Felipe Rodriguez

The Crime

At about 9 a.m. on Nov. 26, 1987 — Thanksgiving Day — the partially-clad body of 35-year-old Maureen “Nina” Fernandez was found in a deserted lot near Long Island Railroad tracks behind a wholesale food warehouse in Queens, New York. She had been stabbed 35 times. 

The Investigation

Peter Soloney, the warehouse night watchman, told police he saw a white car leave the area around 4 a.m., containing only a male driver. Mr. Soloney, who didn’t know much about cars, said it may have been a Cadillac of 1980s vintage.

Police determined that Ms. Fernandez had spent the earlier part of the previous evening in the pediatric ward at Wyckoff Hospital, visiting her two-year-old daughter, who was a patient there. 

Late in the evening, she left to go to a bar on Gates Avenue known variously as Little Liva, Live a Little, and La Fiesta. Witnesses who knew her said she was accompanied by a man whom she seemed to know. Another customer at the bar, Robert Thompson, told police that he tried to sell them a watch. Mr. Thompson and other witnesses would later describe the man she was with as “white,” “Italian,” or “Hispanic,” clean-shaven or clean cut, stocky — weighing between 175 and 200 pounds—and about 5 feet 8 inches tall.

Mr. Thompson, who admitted he was intoxicated on both drugs and alcohol that night, described the man as having reddish-brown hair. Mr. Thompson also claimed he saw writing on the knuckles of the man’s left hand, suggesting the man was right-handed. The initial police investigation focused on a search for a man who may have owned or driven a black Monte Carlo, which Mr. Thompson and another witness had said they saw parked outside the bar that night.

Six months later, detectives learned that the pediatric ward at Wyckoff Hospital was rumored to be a place where male staff and visitors tried to pick up mothers of young patients. So, the police began looking at the staff. Eventually, police determined that Javier Ramos, a hospital security guard, had worked from 4 p.m. until midnight on the night Ms. Fernandez was last seen. Records showed that Mr. Ramos had a white Oldsmobile but had since sold it to another hospital employee.

In August 1988, police took Mr. Soloney to the location where the Oldsmobile was parked. After driving around the block three times, Mr. Soloney tentatively identified the car as the vehicle that he had seen leaving the warehouse area eight months earlier. He said the color of the car differed from the one he saw, because the roof had been painted red. According to detectives, Mr. Soloney said that if the roof were white, it “probably” was the car he saw.

On Sept. 9, 1988, Detective John Beisel questioned Mr. Ramos for several hours. Detective Beisel would later admit in court that he treated Mr. Ramos “very bad,” yelling at him, calling him names, and attempting to put him in “verbal fear” so that he would “tell the truth.” The interrogation ended when Mr. Ramos signed a statement pointing to a friend and fellow security guard at the hospital, Richard Pereira, as Ms. Fernandez’s attacker.

In the statement, Mr. Ramos said that around Thanksgiving in 1987, he was working a hospital shift and agreed to loan his car to Mr. Pereira. Mr. Pereira promised to have it back before midnight but did not. According to police, Mr. Ramos said that when Mr. Pereira returned the car the next morning, he “seemed to be under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol.” 

According to the statement, Mr. Pereira told Mr. Ramos that he had gotten into an argument with a woman that he had met at the hospital.

Mr. Ramos’ statement also said that when he checked his car after Mr. Pereira left, he noticed a “red liquid substance” on the front passenger seat, the floor, one of the doors, an armrest, a window, and a floor mat. He said he and his grandfather took it to a gas station where they cleaned and vacuumed out the car, although they were unable to remove all of the red stains.

Mr. Pereira was arrested and put in a live lineup. La Fiesta bartender Castillo and a bar patron named William Perry viewed the lineup but did not select him. Grace Ceznaukus, the bartender at another tavern Ms. Fernandez had been to earlier on the night she was last seen alive, also did not select Mr. Pereira. He was released.

On Sept. 10, 1988, the white Oldsmobile formerly owned by Mr. Ramos was impounded, and seat cuttings were submitted for serology and DNA testing. No interpretable results were obtained; there were no presumptive-positive results for blood.

Two weeks later, on Sept. 25, 1988, 23-year-old Felipe Rodriguez, who was a friend of Mr. Ramos, voluntarily came for an interview with Detective Beisel. Mr. Rodriguez said he had on several occasions borrowed Mr. Ramos’ car and sometimes visited Mr. Ramos at the hospital. Mr. Rodriguez also mentioned that he worked part-time as an auxiliary police officer. After the interview, Mr. Rodriguez left.

On March 27, 1989, Mr. Ramos was questioned again. This time, he was released after he signed a new affidavit claiming that he “wanted to put an end to this and just tell the truth.” In this account, he said it was Mr. Rodriguez — not Mr. Pereira — who had borrowed his car on Nov. 25, 1987. Mr. Ramos now added a few additional inflammatory details. 

The police report of Mr. Ramos’ statement said he “did not tell the complete truth about what had happened because I didn’t want to tell on Felipe” and that he falsely named Mr. Pereira because he “was the only other person I ever loaned [the car] to” at the time. This statement also differed in that Mr. Ramos now said he cleaned the car himself and not with the help of his grandfather.

Later that day, police arrested Mr. Rodriguez and placed him in a lineup. Only one witness, Mr. Thompson, selected Mr. Rodriguez, although his initial description from nearly a year earlier of a clean-shaven man of Italian descent who was about 5 feet 8 inches tall with reddish-brown hair was vastly different from Mr. Rodriguez, who had a large mustache, jet-black hair, and was 5 feet 11 inches tall. 

Mr. Rodriguez was indicted for the murder. After he took a police-administered polygraph examination and his denials of involvement in the crime showed no deception, Mr. Rodriguez was released on bond pending trial.

The Trial

In April 1990, Mr. Rodriguez went to trial in Queens County Supreme Court.

Mr. Ramos testified and repeated his allegations about the condition of the car and Mr. Rodriguez’s alleged statements the morning he returned the car. Mr. Ramos claimed that he had failed to come forward for months and then falsely accused Mr. Pereira because Mr. Rodriguez was “like a brother” to him. 

During cross-examination, Mr. Ramos denied that his true motivation in naming first Mr. Pereira and then Mr. Rodriguez was to protect himself from suspicion. He asserted that the only lie he told the police was to use Mr. Pereira’s name in his initial statement. He said, “I didn’t want to give up my friend.”

Mr. Thompson identified Mr. Rodriguez as the man with Ms. Fernandez in La Fiesta. Mr. Thompson testified that he shook the man’s hand at the bar and observed that they were “large hands” with “no calluses.” He also testified that the man had letters written on the “outside of the four knuckles” of his left hand, spelling “L-O-V-E.” 

However, Mr. Rodriguez had no tattoos or birthmarks, and the police had not noticed any markings when he was interviewed. Mr. Thompson admitted that he did not mention the marking on the suspect’s hands until the last of his half-dozen police interviews and more than five months into the investigation, even though his earlier statements had described only rings on the man’s hands. He also admitted that he did not actually remember seeing the word “L-O-V-E” but only “figured” that was what the writing spelled out, adding that he “was pretty intoxicated” and “it’s 20 months later.”

Mr. Thompson admitted that during the eight hours prior to his arrival at La Fiesta, he smoked five marijuana joints and consumed a half of a fifth of rum. At La Fiesta, he said he had at least three “double rum” and cola drinks. He said that when he left the bar at 4:30 a.m., Ms. Fernandez and Mr. Rodriguez were still there.

Mr. Castillo, the bartender at La Fiesta, said he did not see any such markings on the suspect’s hands nor did any other witness from either bar. Mr. Castillo further contradicted Mr. Thompson’s testimony. Mr. Castillo said he closed the bar at 4 a.m. Warehouse security guard Mr. Soloney testified that he saw the white car leaving the warehouse area between 3 and 4 a.m. Mr. Soloney did not identify Mr. Rodriguez as the man he saw in the white car. 

On May 2, 1990, the jury convicted Mr. Rodriguez of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

The Exoneration

In reviewing the record, Mr. Rodriguez’s appellate lawyer, Martin Lucente from the Legal Aid Society discovered a reference to a taped conversation between Mr. Ramos and Mr. Pereira. There had been no reference to the tape in the trial.

Mr. Lucente requested a copy of the tape from the Queens County District Attorney’s office, had it translated from Spanish, and transcribed. On the tape, Mr. Pereira confronted Mr. Ramos for falsely implicating Mr. Pereira. 

At Mr. Rodriguez’s trial, Mr. Ramos testified that he had named Mr. Pereira because he was covering for Mr. Rodriguez. On the tape, however, Mr. Ramos told a different story. He said he accused Mr. Pereira after police said Mr. Pereira had falsely accused Mr. Ramos of the crime. 

Mr. Ramos said that he knew nothing about the crime. He said he had not loaned his car to anyone that night. He said he told the police the car was on the street with a dead battery, but “they didn’t want to hear that.” Mr. Ramos also said that the red substance in the car most likely was juice his girlfriend’s son had spilled.

In October 1992, Mr. Lucente filed a motion to set aside Mr. Rodriguez’s convictions on the ground that the tape had not been disclosed prior to his trial.

At a hearing in March 1993, the prosecution disclosed two police reports that referenced the tape. Ms. Maiolo claimed she had never seen them. The trial prosecutor, Alan Safran, contended he turned the tape over to Ms. Maiolo at the beginning of the trial. He also maintained that the recording was “completely uninteresting,” “gibberish,” and “non-believable.” 

On July 30, 1993, the trial judge denied the motion to vacate the conviction, ruling that the defense had failed to show that the tape was not turned over. 

In 2001, after his direct appeal had been rejected, Mr. Rodriguez wrote to the Innocence Project requesting help. In 2007, his case was accepted. By then, most of the physical evidence from Ms. Fernandez’s body and clothing had been destroyed pursuant to the medical examiner’s protocols at the time. Ultimately, extracts from the car fabric cuttings were found, as were hairs from Ms. Fernandez’s clothing. However, the extracts yielded no DNA and the hairs revealed only female DNA.

The Innocence Project recruited private attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma to assist with non-DNA aspects of the case. In November 2016, Nina Morrison, senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project, and Mr. Margulis-Ohnuma filed a petition asking New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to grant clemency. The petition said that Mr. Rodriguez was not only “innocent of the crime of conviction, but, more importantly, is an exceptionally worthy candidate for clemency because of his remarkable record of redemption, responsibility and generosity in prison.”

Mr. Rodriguez had been eligible for parole 25 years into his prison sentence but had declined to appear before the parole board, since he would not admit guilt or express for remorse for a murder he had not committed.

In December 2016, Governor Cuomo commuted Mr. Rodriguez’s sentence to time served. On Jan. 26, 2017, Mr. Rodriguez was released. Subsequently, at the request of Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyers, Queens County Executive Assistant District Attorney Robert Masters re-investigated the case.

As a result, additional undisclosed reports and notes from the detectives’ files were discovered, including a report that one of the witnesses at La Fiesta said Ms. Fernandez and the man with her arrived in the black Monte Carlo. The report discredited the theory that the white car seen by the security guard belonged to the attacker. 

Also undisclosed were reports that Ms. Fernandez’s husband, Carney Fernandez, was a suspect because of numerous witness accounts that he had a violent temper, was known to assault female companions, and that Ms. Fernandez wanted to leave him.

Handwritten notes by a Long Island Railroad detective were discovered as well. The notes indicated that Mr. Ramos described Mr. Rodriguez as showing up at his house with a Black man he had never mentioned before. The notes were dated March 27, 1989 — the same day that Mr. Ramos implicated Mr. Rodriguez and made no mention of such a companion.

In 2017, after being contacted by an Innocence Project investigator, Mr. Ramos recanted, saying his statements to the police were false and the result of police pressure. He stood by his recantation in a lengthy, voluntary interview with Executive Assistant District Attorney Masters in December 2019.

On Dec. 30, 2019, at a hearing in Queens County Supreme Court, Mr. Masters said that the railroad detective’s undisclosed notes could have “impeached the entire investigation.” 

Queens County Supreme Court Justice Joseph Zayas granted a defense motion to vacate the convictions. The district attorney’s office joined the motion, agreeing that evidence favorable to Mr. Rodriguez had not been disclosed. The indictment was dismissed.