This Is A Social A True Social Circles Collide On A Dance Floor Resulting In A Brawl That Ends In Death.
Someone cut the music, and then from the kitchen came the crash of a utensil drawer being yanked out of a wooden cabinet. Vernon Hubbard stepped over tiles strewed with spatulas, spoons, purple plates and an unopened liter of soda. His eyelids were droopy, witnesses said, and in each hand he carried a steak knife.
“Nobody’s getting out of here alive,” he said from the apartment doorway, according to a witness. Others remembered a more lurid phrase: People, he warned, would be “leaving out in body bags.”
Some partygoers sat stone-still, wedged together on a few living room couches. Others untangled themselves from a brawl that had grown out of a dance in the middle of the room. A woman shouted, “All I want to do is go home.”
In a purple-and-white-striped polyester shirt and Nikes, with brandy and beer blurring his thinking, Mr. Hubbard seemed barely able to stand, let alone hold anyone hostage
“I was trying to plug and patch and scream for help,” she said. “Everybody else that was at that party decided to flee the scene.” That image of a stampede of partygoers racing past Mr. Washington’s slumped-over body haunts his brother, Guy Miller. “For everybody just to walk over him, to leave him in the hallway by himself, that’s the crushing part,” Mr. Miller said. “It seemed like he just died by himself, suffering, with nobody there.”Mr. Washington was pronounced dead at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center almost an hour later, at 12:53 a.m. on April 10. He became the sixth of 10 homicides logged this year in the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx, making it the second deadliest in New York City, behind the 75th Precinct in East New York, Brooklyn.
SHE raised him, but the hillside towers of the St. Mary’s Park Houses were his second home. It was there, in Ms. Vargas’s apartment on the ninth floor, that he would play Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, smoke cigarettes and debate voting for Bernie Sanders.
He and Ms. Vargas had met in high school and dated before she came out as gay and he as bisexual. He was witty and self-deprecating, with a natural talent for dance, and he made fast friends around the housing project, where people called him Peaches.
Around 30 people were marooned inside Apartment 15E at 645 Westchester Avenue, a public housing high-rise around East 152nd Street in the South Bronx. Only one elevator was working. Some neighbors, to blunt the weekend noise, had taken sleeping pills and wedged mats in their entryways.
A few people grabbed at Mr. Hubbard’s arms, trying to get him to drop the knives. Others hid in a back bedroom. One woman called the police. Everybody screamed.
Mr. Hubbard started swinging, witnesses and the police said — flailing, really. His arms were locked at the elbow, and his body tipped as he sliced the air.
People saw knives flash inside a knot of bodies.
Moments later, Julian Washington, a 30-year-old man in a fitted Yankees hat, staggered into the building’s hallway, bleeding. He had pushed his best friend, Tawana Vargas, out the door as the fight heated up, and she had been pacing the hallway waiting for him. Now, she pulled his left hand away from his head, figuring — hoping — that he had been smashed with a beer bottle, nothing worse.
Blood spurted out of his neck, a few inches below his left ear, and it ran in rivulets down the beige bricks of the hallway wall.
Mr. Washington choked on a few words, and then collapsed.
Partygoers rushed out behind him, leaving bloody footprints on the floor. Ms. Vargas ran downstairs to look for a police officer.
Balloons in purple, gold and black lost their helium and floated to the apartment’s linoleum tile floor. Napkins, ribbons and plastic cups were cracked and torn. They were all in purple, to celebrate the first year the party’s host, Darshonna Willoughby, who is Mr. Hubbard’s cousin, had survived with lupus.
Mr. Hubbard waited at the elevator bank. His leather jacket, investigators said, was covered in blood, on its collar and elbows and pockets. The one working elevator arrived. He showed little of the panic of someone who had just stabbed a man, the police said.
At the foot of the high-rise, part of the St. Mary’s Park Houses, he tossed a knife into the parking lot, witnesses said, waved his arm in vain for a cab and then lumbered toward the subway. Witnesses said the crime was so senseless and the getaway so inept that they had been moved, against their instincts, to point him out to police officers, who stopped him near the subway.
On the 15th floor, one person crouched by Mr. Washington’s side: Mr. Hubbard’s sister, Cassandra Newbold, who had been fighting with Mr. Washington, too. She used his clothes to try to stop the bleeding.
Police officers investigating Mr. Washington’s killing on April 10 at the St. Mary’s Park Houses.Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times
On April 9, a Saturday, he walked there over the Harlem River, his long legs carrying him almost as quickly as the subway could. On the stove in his apartment, Mr. Washington had left half a pot of seafood gumbo, a favorite dish among his friends that he hoped to perfect in culinary school someday soon.
He met Ms. Vargas in her sister’s apartment in the same complex, where Mr. Washington sometimes stayed the night on a tattered couch beneath the windows.
Mr. Washington was unemployed, but his friends were unwinding from long weeks at work. They passed around big bottles of Corona, the communion cup of their gatherings.
From there, they bounced around an archipelago of public housing apartments, corner spots and hallways where they could hang out free of charge and unbothered, for the most part, by the police. Mr. Washington drank beer, got some food and talked up a recent WWE wrestling event with a younger friend. At each spot, they picked up a few more people.
Ms. Vargas said she recently warned Mr. Washington about the danger lurking in her corner of the vast public housing landscape in the South Bronx. “Don’t hang out in this building,” she said she told him. “This area is just bad, period. Just stay in Harlem where you live.” But, she added, “Julian was just that type of person always looking for something.”
Mr. Washington used to party in the West Village and at the nearby piers with a ragtag group of gay people, many of them black and Hispanic. But as gentrification marched toward the water, his circle lost that spot on the margins of the city, where they could let loose among strangers they trusted. Mr. Washington started spending more time in Bronx parks and housing projects.
Shortly after 11 p.m., Mr. Washington got curious about the party for Ms. Willoughby on the 15th floor. They had not been invited, and none of them were dressed in purple, the color of lupus awareness, as an invitation had asked, so Mr. Washington walked down a flight of stairs to ask if they could join.
“So then he came back, he was like, ‘Yes, it’s lit, she said we can come down,’” Ms. Vargas said.
Tension Builds and Bursts
For much of the night, the party had been relaxed. Mr. Hubbard had arrived around 6 p.m. People were sitting and talking on couches around the living room. Reggae and hip-hop hits were playing over the speakers, among them Rihanna’s single “Work,” Mr. Washington’s favorite song of the moment.
It had something of the feeling of a family reunion. Ms. Willoughby had invited a number of her cousins, among them Mr. Hubbard, with whom she had reconnected only a few months earlier through her grandfather.
He had come halfheartedly, his mother said in an interview. His sister, Ms. Newbold, asked him to bring food she had cooked: pans of pork shoulder, fried chicken, collard greens, crab salad and macaroni and cheese.
Ms. Willoughby, wearing all black, cut the cake, which had two photos: one when she was in the hospital being treated for lupus, and another from when she had started feeling better.
Mr. Hubbard, 35, looked out of place. A fast-food chef who had entered foster care when he was 12, he had been spending much of his time at home since being stabbed in the spine with an ice pick last summer during a robbery or possible gang assault, his mother, Venice Quinones, said. He was overheard complaining to his sister about wanting to go home until she persuaded him to stay. And he was getting drunk. He said in a jailhouse interview that he was downing E&J brandy and Miller beer.
“He just looked crazy in his eyes — he looked crazy to me,” said Natasha Hill, a partygoer. “They were red, and he looked like he had evil in his eyes.”
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