She worried he had been locked out of his apartment, and one day last month told her mother she wanted to offer him some soup. But the mother, mindful of the danger that faces residents in the stairwells and expansive courtyards of the Mott Haven Houses, warned her it was the kind of encounter that could get her killed.
A few days later, the man, Angel Feliz-Volquez, 26, hearing her in the fifth-floor hallway, burst from his apartment with a 20-inch machete and Carmen Torres-Gonzalez, 59. He sliced her neck, face, shoulder and forearm, the back of her head and both her hands, severing one, and then stood over her, according to a police report.
Ms. Torres-Gonzalez’s killing was the first of 2016 in the a two-square-mile area at the southern tip of the Bronx where the towers of 14 housing projects dominate the skyline, methadone clinics dot the main thoroughfares, and gangs and drug-dealing wane with each police roundup and then roar back.
The 40th Precinct, though, remains one of a few areas where homicides have persisted, feeding off the isolation of poverty and turf rivalries among criminal crews that linger despite the neighborhood’s progress in undoing some of its history as an emblem of urban blight. In the neighborhoods that make up the precinct — Melrose, Mott Haven and Port Morris — nine people were murdered last year; the precinct recorded the biggest increase in the city in major crimes.To understand how and why killings continue in a city that has seen crime fall to historic lows, The New York Times is reporting this year on violence in the 40th Precinct, and documenting the story of each homicide.
Housing and gangs,” said Robert K. Boyce, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, who led the 40th Precinct from 2000 to 2002. “Each housing development has its own little gang or crew.”
The 40th Precinct, though, remains one of a few areas where homicides have persisted, feeding off the isolation of poverty and turf rivalries among criminal crews that linger despite the neighborhood’s progress in undoing some of its history as an emblem of urban blight. In the neighborhoods that make up the precinct — Melrose, Mott Haven and Port Morris — nine people were murdered last year; the precinct recorded the biggest increase in the city in major crimes.To understand how and why killings continue in a city that has seen crime fall to historic lows, The New York Times is reporting this year on violence in the 40th Precinct, and documenting the story of each homicide.
Housing and gangs,” said Robert K. Boyce, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, who led the 40th Precinct from 2000 to 2002. “Each housing development has its own little gang or crew.”
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