Murder
Upon his return to Staten Island, Zappalorti did not hold down a formal job but was frequently seen in the neighborhood planting trees and clearing away debris. All of this came to an abrupt end on the evening of January 22, 1990, after Zappalorti invited a neighborhood resident and his companion to a small hut he had built on the edge of the property of his family's home. Once there, the duo demanded Zappalorti's wallet, and, after he tossed the wallet into the yard, the neighbor, Michael Taylor, 20 years old, pulled out a hunting knife and stabbed him three times in the chest and abdomen, causing his death; Zappalorti's brother, Michael Zappalorti Jr., discovered the body at 11:30 A.M. the following morning. A subsequent autopsy showed four stab wounds, and authorities speculate that the fourth wound was inflicted by Taylor's accomplice, identified as 26-year-old Phillip Sarlo.
Taylor was taken into custody at 2:30 A.M. on January 24 as he stepped outside a bar in the South Beach section of Staten Island, but Sarlo fled the area and was not apprehended until February 18, after he was found to be in Ocala, Florida. Gay rights activists asked New York State Governor Mario Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor to the case, citing the fact that Staten Island District Attorney William Murphy had been the only one of the city's five district attorneys to go on record as opposing the city's anti-gay-discrimination law when it was passed in 1986; and that also, in that same year, Murphy had prosecuted a carjacking case involving Taylor, Sarlo and two others that resulted in Taylor, then 16 years old, being adjudicated a juvenile offender when he could have been tried as an adult, and Sarlo receiving the minimum sentence — 1½ to 4½ years — then possible on the charges under which he had been indicted. In both the 1986 carjacking case and the Zappalorti murder, Taylor, in statements he made to the police, cited animosity toward homosexuals as a motive for the crime (the victim in the 1986 case was attacked near a boardwalk in the South Beach area reportedly frequented by homosexuals, and Zappalorti's sexual orientation was common knowledge in the neighborhood where both he and Taylor resided). Sarlo, however, denied harboring such sentiments.
Read more about this topic: James Zappalorti
Famous quotes containing the word murder:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)
““If Steam has done nothing else, it has at least added a whole new Species to English Literature ... the booklets—the little thrilling romances, where the Murder comes at page fifteen, and the Wedding at page forty—surely they are due to Steam?”
“And when we travel by electricity—if I may venture to develop your theory—we shall have leaflets instead of booklets, and the Murder and the Wedding will come on the same page.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“As I sat before the fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above or around me, I remembered how far on every hand that wilderness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire; for Nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)