Free Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth by Tim McLoughlin Page B

said Hendrix.
    “Me and my brother, Troy, we’re the fun-time monsters,” said Pearson. He was smiling.
    Pearson was still grinning when New York State Supreme Court Justice James Starkey ordered the pair to serve another twenty-two years in prison on top of the crushing murder sentence they had already received—life plus twenty-five years.
    The sentence meant that even if some legal fluke nullified their life sentences, Pearson and Hendrix would spend fortyseven years behind bars. Neither man is eligible for parole.
    It’s about as much prison time as you can get in a state like New York that has effectively abolished the death penalty. (New York has not executed anyone since 1963. The state still has a death penalty law on the books, but in June 2004 it was declared unconstitutional by the state’s highest court. There are no prisoners on New York’s death row.)
    As of this writing in late 2007, Pearson and Hendrix are being held in solitary confinement—locked down for up to twenty-three hours a day. They will almost certainly die behind bars. But it’s not an excessive punishment, considering the vile and vicious things they did.
    On April 24, 2003, Pearson and Hendrix abducted a pretty, petite twenty-one-year-old college student named Romona Moore off the street in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood. She was walking along Kings Highway, a well-traveled road, around 7 o’clock that evening.
    It’s not clear exactly how Pearson and Hendrix got Romona off the street and into the basement of 5807 Snyder Avenue. The most likely scenario is that they simply attacked and dragged her into their lair—a move that might have been risky, given how many cars travel along Kings Highway and its side streets, but not impossible.
    It’s likely, too, that the monsters employed a wicked charm in luring Romona to the vicinity of the small house where they attacked her. Both men, it turned out, were good at sweet-talking young women. They had a knack for appearing normal and friendly just long enough to put their prey at ease—before erupting in savage violence.
    Pearson was twenty-one, Hendrix was nineteen. They knew nothing about the young woman they would butcher, although she lived only a few blocks from Hendrix.
    Romona, the only child of Elle Carmichael, arrived in Brooklyn at age four when her mother moved from Guyana, part of a tide of Caribbean newcomers who turned East Flatbush into a bustling black neighborhood full of ambitious entrepreneurs and hard-working civil servants.
    The deal was simple, and understood from the slums of Kingston to the hills of Trinidad: You could trade status in the Caribbean for opportunity in the States. It was common to find men and women who had been engineers, administrators, or bankers in the Caribbean working as maids, cooks, janitors, and cab drivers in Brooklyn, often with the prickly impatience of people eager to regain their stations in life.
    They bought homes, started families, joined churches, and saved their pennies. Some kept two passports, and thereby dual citizenship, sending their children to stay with relatives in Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, Barbados, Grenada, or Guyana every summer—all with an eye toward a triumphant retirement someday back on their sun-drenched islands. What began as a small Caribbean colony in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century grew by leaps and bounds over the decades; by the 1980s, East Flatbush was an island community with its own robust civic associations, political clubs, restaurants, and grocery stores.
    The proud islanders who built the community never let the West Indian lilt leave their voices. But many grew to love their new home, and either sank roots in Brooklyn or joined New York’s age-old, working-class pilgrimage to the suburbs.
    Romona was part of this immigrant journey, growing up with five cousins in the heart of Caribbean Brooklyn. She was dark-skinned with a bright, warm smile. One of her professors at Hunter