Killed With Sword
A horrific incident I’ve spontaneously recalled many, many times. The story just bleeds with rich but awful detail. It’s almost up there with scenes from Frankenstein.
The poor girl almost escaping, but a few moments later reduced to a headless corpse. Terrible, terrible. The killer walking away calmly. But a few moments later running, chased by an outraged mob. The mob then cornering him and pummeling him with “sticks and bricks,” then coming at him a second time, with their fists. A third time and they might have killed him.
In the end, that mob is “almost in shock.” From what they saw, but also what they did, I’m betting.
It breaks my heart a little that the victim and her friend, right before this horror began, were busy at their job for “a pamphlet distribution firm.” Was firm the best word? Probably not, but I’m glad I used it. There’s an aspirational charm to it. And the name of that firm makes me almost sob: “Circular Express.” I think of those two girls telling their fathers the name of their new employer, and the fathers wanting to laugh, but holding it in. They’re glad their girls have found a way to make money, something to put their passion into.
I think this story, back in the day, struck me not as a tragedy, but as some macabre proof that Canarsie was as bad as I sometimes said it was. As though this incident somehow served Canarsie right. I’m ashamed to say it. Of course poverty, and crime, and awful luck, do exist, and do bleed sometimes from one life to another. But people trapped in hell aren’t lesser people. They’re to be loved even more. That poor girl and her poor family. That other poor girl who watched her friend reduced to death that way. Those admirable, shocked people caught up in an almost murderous rage. Something monstrous came into our struggling town that day. We should all have been moved to start an effort to stop it from coming again. I, in particular, should have been slapped more awake.
MAN KILLS GIRLFRIEND WITH SWORD
May 19, 1987—A Brooklyn man used a hunting knife and sword to kill his 18-year-old former girlfriend in a daylight attack Friday morning on East 91st Street, in full view of coworkers and passing motorists, according to police.
Johane Mentor, who would have been 19 Saturday, was stabbed two or three times with a knife and then, when she tried to flee, struck on the head with a four-foot sword, nearly decapitating her, police reported.
Outraged onlookers chased the suspect, beating him and “holding him at bay” until police arrived a short time later, according to Detective Sergeant Lyle Forster of the 69th Police Precinct.
“It was gruesome, bizarre,” said Forster, who handled the initial crime scene. He said witnesses afterwards “were almost in shock.”
The suspect, identified as 22-year-old Eustache Rodrigue, Williams Avenue, was described as a jilted boyfriend who had followed Mentor from Haiti two years earlier. He has been charged with homicide in the second degree.
According to Forster, Mentor was a student at Prospect Heights High School before Rodrigue “induced” her to take a job with him at Circular Express, a pamphlet distribution firm at 9016 Ditmas Avenue, where the murder took place.
Mentor lived on East 21st Street with her family, said Forster.
The detective said Rodrigue had approached Mentor about 8 a.m. as she sat in a van outside Circular Express with two co-workers. The girl agreed to walk with Rodrigue, came back to the van briefly for a notepad, and was heard screaming for help a few moments later, said Forster.
The two had walked about 75 feet up East 91st Street, where Rodrigue allegedly stabbed the girl two or three times in the body with a serrated hunting knife, according to Forster and a separate police report.
Co-workers heard the girl’s screams and thought she was being punched, Forster said. They approached the two, enabling the girl to escape momentarily and flee back towards her friends’ van.
But Rodrigue caught the girl and swung at her with the sword, causing a head wound, said Forster. Rodrigue then straddled the girl’s prone body and, using both hands, again swung the three-foot blade, this time nearly severing the victim’s head, said Forster.
Rodrigue dropped the sword—which he originally had been carrying sheathed, inside a cardboard box—and “walked away calmly.”
Moments later he was being pursued by a park attendant, motorists and co-workers—a mob of about 15 or 20 people, said Forster. The suspect fled to a front stoop on Remsen Avenue, still carrying the hunting knife, and at that point was pummeled by sticks and bricks from the mob, Forster said.
Police Officers Brady and Gitto of the 67th Precinct arrived in response to a 911 call and arrested Rodrigue, ordering him at gunpoint to drop his knife. As officers were handcuffing the suspect, the crowd agains began to attack him, this time with their fists, according to the detective.
The suspect was taken to Kings county Hospital, where he was treated for injuries to his head, right eye and right foot, a police report said.
Sgt. Forster said the victim had come to America about two years ago “at the request of her grandmother, to get away from this guy.” He said that Rodrigue had followed Mentor here and that he had threatened to kill a member of her family.
Those who witnessed the murder Friday morning were “almost in shock,” said the detective.
Looking Back
This story was first published in The Canarsie Courier, a Brooklyn Newspaper, in ___ of 1987?