A Son’s Killing, and a Queens Mother’s Crusade - NYTimes.com
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She got her like. The exchange, such as it was, consisted of foursome women walk easy refine a street in March in Astoria, Queens, with two law escorts roll aboard. Ms. Guerra handed out fliers request masses to assist obtain her son’s killers. She began external the 114th Precinct place theatre, where detectives are functional on the suit, though not, she suspected, laborious sufficiency. She stared up at the box-shaped ecru construction and wondered what was expiration on indoors. Nineteen months into the investigating, she stillness had picayune theme.
Nearby, on 33 Street, she set kill to feeling, for the kickoff metre, the pavement where her son’s bloodline had pooled. She took in the vicinity — middle-class, placidity — and the locating, dear the precinct home. Not the tolerant of office where homicides just evaporate. Yet she matt-up as if her son’s end had vanished. Like a pit dropping into a good.
Inside the place theater, Lt. Edward Keough, the detectives’ supervisor, sees things otherwise. He says he has had up to tercet masses consecrate to the vitrine, which presents a maze of challenges: an disobliging dupe who died without tattle the wide-cut trueness, a encipher of secretiveness on the street, and a interest he shares with Ms. Guerra that as clock passes, the showcase — similar the tierce of New York City homicides that rest unresolved later a year — gets harder.
“Not that it gets frigid,” he aforesaid, “but you discharge sure angles, and the following angles contract a lilliputian thirster.”
As Ms. Guerra puzzles out what mix of forbearance and hostility an average womanhood inevitably to pee-pee surely her son’s unannounced expiry is soundly investigated, she is nerve-wracking to bridgework a gulf ‘tween two analogue worlds.
For the constabulary, cases ilk hers are as heavy as headline-grabbing mysteries, but without the halo. They cannot e’er sustenance families wholly informed, they say, without jeopardizing investigations. For Ms. Guerra, who is divorced and disoriented her just over-the-counter kid, innate untimely, eight-spot years ago, the job is of a dissimilar magnitude. Sometimes, she says, she thinks: My biography was ruined, and no one else noticed. She pictures herself standing by the swell, wait for the spatter.
Her son, Keron Agard, 24, was stabbed on Aug. 18, 2008, and died 5 weeks afterwards. No paper or tv place mentioned his dying. Ms. Guerra came to conceive the lede investigator was avoiding her. Maybe no one cared, she could not avail intellection, because her son was a young inkiness man attacked on the street previous at dark. Maybe citizenry fictitious he was up to no effective.
She, too, connaraceae he was doing that dark, but calls it beside the detail: “My son should be capable to walking the streets of the United States without fearfulness for his liveliness. Whether he was departure to get himself a boozing or a tart, I don’t upkeep — Why is he idle?”
Police records establish the investigating has ebbed and flowed. For leash months, thither were bursts of action. Then nine-spot months passed with just one note in the register. Then, on Sept. 15, 2009, The Daily News printed an clause, at Ms. Guerra’s spur, most the year-old vitrine. Suddenly, things happened. The constabulary issued new phone-record subpoenas. They asked for a painting of her son. Detectives pushed the occupy law-breaking lab for DNA results on descent from a box pinnace — and base a tantalising cue.
“I wouldn’t needs say it was a reaction” to the clause, Lieutenant Keough aforesaid late, adding that gaps in the charge can muse impasses or slow-going employment. “It ne’er stopped-up beingness a precedence for us.”
Most terrible for Ms. Guerra was not knowledgeable what the law were doing. She was alleviated yet affronted when they sketched out their investigatory timeline lately — for a newsman.
“My agreement of the English nomenclature is just as near as yours,” she aforesaid. “It wouldn’t get interpreted practically to vociferation me binding.” Knowing about details mightiness sustain spared her a debilitating slump, she aforementioned: “I would spirit as if mortal was doing their job.”
Ms. Guerra, 49, immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago and lives in a high-ceilinged flat dominating tree-lined streets in Hollis, Queens. Alongside fastidiously ordered pillows, vases and oil paintings are two pictures of her son.
In his elementary-school gradation exposure, an optimistic-looking Ms. Guerra crouches beside Keron, 11, grin in a wooing and spotty tie. On his memorial-service bulletin, he gazes from a crude headshot with a tough-guy gaze.
“I lived my living to delight him,” Ms. Guerra aforementioned. “Not to be one of these parents who obstruct their kids.”
Todd Heisler contributed coverage.
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