In a video that Gomez recorded on his cellphone, Nardoni offered an account of what happened on the night of the shooting — a story he would later repeat in a legal filing. He said he was walking home after visiting a girl when he saw a crowd of kids fighting, turned away from them, heard gunshots and realized he’d been hit. He claimed he didn’t see who shot him. After he got home from the hospital, he was met by the police, who took him into the 42nd Precinct, where he said he was interrogated by David Terrell. Nardoni claimed Terrell pulled him into a room to show him a single picture of “some light-skin kid” — a description that could have fit Hernandez and many other kids as well. In the video, Nardoni recalled telling Terrell he hadn’t seen the kid before. And at that point, by Nardoni’s account, Terrell tried to bully him into naming the young man in the photo as the shooter, threatening to punch his head into a wall if he didn’t comply. (In his lawsuit, Terrell said he had no personal involvement with Nardoni, and his lawyer called Nardoni’s claims false.)
Although Nardoni said Terrell didn’t follow through on the threat, Gomez was confident the story would raise enough questions about Terrell’s integrity to get Hernandez’s case dismissed. Gomez took the video to the district attorney’s office, along with his videos of the four witnesses who said that Hernandez didn’t do the shooting, and one witness herself. He hoped that after reviewing the evidence, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, David Slott, would dismiss the charges against Hernandez. Instead, at Hernandez’s next bail hearing, Slott changed his theory of the case and claimed that Hernandez handed the gun to whoever actually pulled the trigger, an offense that could still keep Hernandez locked up for years. Slott added that he didn’t fully believe the testimony of the witness Gomez brought to his office. (The district attorney’s office declined to comment on the case.)
Gomez was undeterred. If he couldn’t discredit the case against his client, he would discredit the people who had built it. Over the next few months, he scoured the streets of Hernandez’s neighborhood, talking to everyone he could, determined to prove that the cops, not Hernandez, were the real criminals. He said that what he wanted was justice for Hernandez, but it soon became clear that his motives went deeper. “It’s payback,” he admitted at one point. “Payback in spades.”
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Born in Puerto Rico, Gomez spent his early years in the South Bronx, the only child of a single mother. They lived on the Grand Concourse, a boulevard lined with once-stately apartment buildings that by the ’70s were falling into abandonment and disarray. Gangs roamed the streets, and Gomez, small and scrawny, was a target, he said. “You had to fight,” he said, “because if you didn’t fight, they’d beat the [expletive] out of you more.”
In school, Gomez says, he received a diagnosis of dyslexia and was placed into a special-education program, but his mother refused to let him doubt himself. “She would always say to me: ‘Little Manuel, a man who sets limitations has limitations. What are yours?’ And I was to say: ‘Nothing, Mom. I can do everything.’ And if I didn’t, I would get smacked in the head.” Inspired by Captain America comics, Gomez joined the military after high school, eventually becoming an Army intelligence officer and deploying to Iraq. In the late ’90s, between stints overseas, he returned to the Bronx and decided to become a cop. His trouble with the N.Y.P.D. began almost immediately: Two months after he entered the academy, the department demanded his resignation. On his application, he had written that he had never been arrested, but his supervisors said his record showed otherwise. Gomez had had a couple of encounters with police officers in the past, but none that he ever thought of as an arrest. In one incident, a cop stopped him in the subway saying he fit the description of a suspect, but the commanders at the precinct quickly realized they had the wrong person and let him go. No prints were taken, no charges filed. Still, the voided arrest record remained logged in the N.Y.P.D. database.
Banished from the department, Gomez decided to join a class-action lawsuit filed by the Latino Officers Association, a group of cops who were suing the N.Y.P.D. over what they claimed was a deep-seated culture of discrimination against black and Latino officers. He also helped to draft state and federal legislation that would erase erroneous arrests from people’s records. In the Congressional Record from March 2001, Representative Jerrold Nadler lauded Gomez as “an example of a crusader who stays focused, works hard and demands results.” The bills eventually died, but that same year the department offered Gomez his job back. “What a mistake that was,” Gomez told me with a sardonic laugh.
His first assignment, in 2003, was in the 43rd Precinct, a high-crime area not far from where he grew up. He proved to be what the department calls a “proactive” cop — the kind who goes out looking for people to arrest instead of just responding to 911 calls. Such officers typically thrive in the department, earning commendations and promotions. But Gomez’s career followed a different trajectory. Within a year, the department had placed him under review. In a letter to the department’s headquarters, his precinct commander noted that civilians had been filing official complaints against Gomez, accusing him of verbally abusing them, threatening them with violence and using excessive force. Gomez points out that the department later held a hearing in which he was cleared of wrongdoing. Like many cops, he frames his complaint record as a litany of false claims made by criminals who resented his aggressive approach to policing; in other words, it was an unavoidable consequence of behaving exactly as the department wanted cops to behave.
The real problem, Gomez says, was that he had joined the class-action discrimination lawsuit, earning a reputation among his supervisors as a loudmouth and a malcontent, a “rat.” Convinced that his commanders were retaliating against him, he filed a complaint with the N.Y.P.D. equal-opportunity office in 2004, accusing them of discrimination. Anthony Miranda, founder of the Latino Officers Association, told me he warned Gomez that the retaliation would intensify. “Everything they have, they’re going to throw on you,” he recalled saying. “You got to be extra careful right now.”
Just a few days later, Gomez was driving down a dark, empty street when a guy in a van waved him over and tried to hand him a paper bag filled with packets of what looked like heroin. The man was dressed like a utility worker and claimed that he had found the bag at his work site. Gomez says he suspected that the man was conducting an “integrity test” — a procedure in which undercover Internal Affairs officers try to tempt fellow cops into accepting bribes or drugs. He says he knew that the department guidelines required him to take the bag to the precinct and hand it over to his supervisors. But then he remembered Miranda’s warning. Was this a setup? If he followed the rules and drove off with the bag, he worried Internal Affairs might try to frame him by claiming he had kept some of the drugs for himself.
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Gomez offered to drive the man to the precinct; that way, Gomez wouldn’t have to touch the bag, and no one could say he’d stolen any drugs. It turned out Gomez was right to be suspicious: The man worked for Internal Affairs. He got back in the van and drove off. Gomez was soon cited for “failing to take police action,” another stain on his record.
Over the next few years, things only got worse. Gomez, who was still in the Army Reserve, was sent to Afghanistan, and when he returned after a year he was suffering from insomnia, sleeping three hours a night. Back at work, he was punished for various infractions, like allowing a prisoner to use the restroom unaccompanied, and he was shuttled among a series of dreary “punishment posts” — the auto pound by the Gowanus Bay, the lost-property division in Queens. Gomez says this was all retaliation for suing the department.
On an August afternoon in 2009, while off duty, he was driving down a street in the Bronx when he got into a furious argument with a woman he was dating. He pulled over and demanded that she get out of the car, eventually walking around to her side and pulling her out. Later, in a Police Department administrative trial, she said Gomez punched her in the legs. (Gomez denies this.) Gomez got back in and was about to drive off when she slammed her fist into the back windshield, breaking the glass. Blood began gushing from her hand.
As Gomez called 911, a crowd of bystanders gathered in the street. Several men, believing that Gomez had attacked the woman, approached. Gomez began shouting that he was a cop. He says someone grabbed him from behind, and he fell, fracturing three of his ribs. He took out his gun and aimed it at the crowd, telling the men to back away. The woman began to leave the scene, trailing blood. Gomez followed her, handcuffed her uninjured hand and brought her back to his car.
When the police arrived, Gomez ordered them to arrest the men in the crowd, shouting that they had assaulted an officer. The officers arrested Gomez instead. He spent the next five days in jail.
This wasn’t the only time the cops were called to respond to a domestic incident involving Gomez. At least three other instances have been documented. In one case, Gomez pleaded guilty to harassment with physical contact. After the incident on the street, the woman Gomez was accused of assaulting said he urged her to write a letter to the district attorney asking him to drop the charges. She did, and the case was dismissed. But when the N.Y.P.D. held its own administrative trial, a prosecutor for the department argued that Gomez had committed multiple acts of misconduct. Declaring that Gomez’s defiant testimony at the trial revealed “a complete lack of insight into the inappropriate nature of his action,” Deputy Commissioner David Weisel wrote that Gomez deserved a “higher penalty” than other officers charged with similar infractions. Gomez was fired.
Exiled from the department for the second time in his career, Gomez filed for his license to become a private investigator. At first he took whatever jobs came his way. He tailed cheating husbands and ran background checks on potential hires. He worked as a bounty hunter. And then he stumbled onto the case of Enger Javier, the Dominican immigrant who had spent two years in Rikers. After getting that case dismissed, he began acquiring a reputation in the South Bronx as a sort of folk hero. Desperate mothers began calling him for help, telling him the cops were targeting their sons.
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In the fall of 2016, Gomez started walking the streets of the South Bronx with a picture of Detective Terrell, the officer whom Perez had accused of going after Hernandez. One day, I watched him show the photo to a group of young men outside a bodega. They were wary at first, and then one began to talk, and another, and suddenly they were all talking at once. “There’s myths in the hood about him,” one kid cried out. “Stuff like, ‘Don’t say “Bloody Mary” in the mirror.’ Like, ‘Don’t run from Officer Terrell, because when he catch you, you’re probably not going to be able to speak about it.’ ”
By then, Gomez had been going on missions like this for months, sometimes with reporters in tow. He had found more than a half dozen young men who claimed, as they would later describe in court filings, that Terrell had harassed them, physically abused them or arrested them on false pretexts. Some told Gomez that Terrell had tried to get them to pin crimes on one another by threatening them with violence. (Terrell would claim these charges were false in his lawsuit.)
One young man, Anthony Floyd, told Gomez on video that Terrell and other officers had beaten him in a cell at the 42nd Precinct, breaking his nose and eye socket. Gomez relayed these stories to his contacts in the local media: Sarah Wallace at NBC and James Ford at PIX11, who reported on these claims about Terrell and the 42nd Precinct. In December 2016, as media coverage mounted, the Police Department took Terrell out of the 42nd Precinct and relegated him to a job escorting prisoners in a Manhattan courthouse. The department said it was investigating his involvement in an unrelated domestic incident.
Hernandez’s situation remained unchanged. But he stayed in jail, where he says he was repeatedly assaulted because he refused to join a gang. “I’m not suicidal,” he told me on the phone from Rikers in April 2017, “but I’d rather be dead than being in here.” Every month or so, he would return to the Bronx courthouse for a hearing. But each time, the judge would grant the prosecutor’s request to delay the case.
Although the right to a speedy trial is guaranteed by the Constitution, the Bronx’s court system is so clogged that cases can drag on for years. This often works to the advantage of the prosecutors. By asking for delays, they can prolong a defendant’s stay in jail, ratcheting up the pressure to take a plea deal. In New York State, more than 98 percent of felony arrests that end in convictions occur through a guilty plea.
In July 2017, when Hernandez had been in Rikers for nearly a year, the D.A.’s office offered him a deal. If he pleaded guilty, he could go home, and if he managed to avoid arrest for the next five years, his record as a youthful offender would be sealed. By then, Hernandez had earned his high school diploma in the East River Academy on Rikers. He also tutored other inmates and was nominated for a scholarship from the Posse Foundation, which awards college scholarships to outstanding public-school students. To have a chance at the scholarship, he would have to interview in early September. If he refused the plea deal and the prosecutors kept delaying the trial, he would risk losing the opportunity. But if he took the deal and was later arrested — a likely scenario given his history with the police in his neighborhood — he would be a felon for the rest of his life.
