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Man Charged With Murder in Death of Emergency Worker in the Bronx Man Charged With Murder in Death of Emergency Worker in the Bronx
(about 13 hours later)
A man has been charged with murder after taking an ambulance and running over an emergency medical worker in the Bronx on Thursday night, killing her and injuring another, the authorities said. They lived on the same Bronx block, but on opposite ends of the city’s system for treating the sick and emotionally disturbed.
Jose Gonzalez, 25, was also charged with grand larceny and operating a vehicle while impaired by drugs, the authorities said. He was taken into custody on Thursday. He was an occasional patient, a 25-year-old Bloods member whose family said he showed symptoms of schizophrenia and depression and received psychiatric treatment after run-ins with the police. She was a caregiver who had worked for 14 years as an emergency medical technician with the New York Fire Department and had two sons who were trying to follow her into the profession.
The police said the episode happened around 7:10 p.m. at White Plains Road and Watson Avenue near the Soundview section of the Bronx. Around sunset on Thursday, four miles from their block, they met at the back of an ambulance. The man, Jose Gonzalez, who appeared heavily intoxicated in cellphone videos recorded a short while before, had hopped on the back bumper of an ambulance for a joy ride, riding three blocks before someone flagged down Yadira Arroyo, the emergency medical technician, who was driving, the police said.
Two Fire Department emergency medical technicians were responding to a call when they were alerted by a passer-by that someone was riding on the back bumper of the ambulance, officials said. Ms. Arroyo, 44, was working overtime and on her way to help a pregnant woman. She stopped the ambulance and got out to figure out what was happening.
The emergency medical workers got out of the ambulance to confront Mr. Gonzalez. He started to walk away from the ambulance, but then turned back and got into the driver’s seat, officials said. Mr. Gonzalez had just thrown a teenage boy against a fence and stolen his backpack, a criminal complaint said, pretending to be a police officer and telling the boy he was arresting him. Now, Mr. Gonzalez was saying that he had hurt his hand and needed help. Ms. Arroyo, who was familiar with the strange and sometimes scary encounters that emergency medical workers endure, told him to return the backpack.
He put the ambulance in reverse, striking the passenger and running over the driver, Yadira Arroyo, 44, who was killed. Instead, Mr. Gonzalez took a few steps, then spun around and ran into the open driver’s side door, Deputy Chief Jason Wilcox, commanding officer of Bronx detectives, said. Ms. Arroyo tried to pull him out. From the passenger seat, her partner fought him, but he put the ambulance into reverse, trapping Ms. Arroyo underneath and eventually dragging her into an intersection.
An officer from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on patrol got out of his vehicle and, with the help of four or five bystanders, took Mr. Gonzalez into custody, officials said. Videos posted to Twitter by a passer-by showed a chaotic scene as the emergency medical worker who was injured cried loudly and screamed, “My partner!” Her death plunged the city’s medical workers into mourning and sent ripples beyond the city. The specter of an intoxicated, mentally ill man turning an ambulance into a weapon was a stark reminder of the random dangers of a profession whose practitioners often get second billing to their firefighter colleagues. And Mr. Gonzalez’s case — the second in recent months in which a man with a history of crime and mental illness killed a public safety worker in New York City — renewed concerns about the shortcomings of the systems that treat violent and vulnerable people.
At a news conference at Jacobi Medical Center on Thursday night, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Ms. Arroyo was a 14-year veteran of the Fire Department with five children. The episode was all the more chilling for how the lives of Mr. Gonzalez and Ms. Arroyo had brushed up against each other in recent years. Several people knew both of them from their block, on Creston Avenue, a few blocks south of Fordham Road and just east of the Grand Concourse.
The mayor said he spoke to some of her family members, adding that they were going through “unspeakable grief.” At the supportive shelter for homeless people where Mr. Gonzalez lived, he had a reputation for lashing out when he was not taking his medication, sometimes over laundry money. A few doors down, at the apartment building where Ms. Arroyo was raised, she was known to work extra hours to provide for her five children, aged 7 to 24, and to spread the gospel of emergency medical work.
The other emergency medical worker, a 30-year-old-woman, was in stable condition on Friday morning, the authorities said. “She told her children, ‘You’ll see things and be scared, but you must have a good head on your shoulders and serve and protect your community,’” said Monica Salazar, the fiancé of Ms. Arroyo’s half brother. “And that’s what she died doing: protecting her partner.”
Two relatives of Mr. Gonzalez said he had been depressed since his mother died when he was an adolescent. He was known to the police because they have had numerous encounters with him as an emotionally disturbed person, they said. The partner, Monique Williams, who was injured, was treated at Jacobi Medical Center and released. More than 500 emergency medical workers lined the ramp of the hospital early on Friday and watched Ms. Arroyo’s body driven away in an ambulance to the city Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy.
Mr. Gonzalez had taken several worrying turns in the hours before he hopped onto Ms. Arroyo’s ambulance. He posted cellphone video online of himself with lipstick smeared around his gaptoothed grin, his tongue wagging from his mouth and his left hand dripping with blood. Behind him was a cracked windowpane. He rapped along to music, gang beads hanging from his neck and a cut over his left eye. In one video, he shouted, “Blood up,” interjecting an expletive, a reference to his decade-long membership in the Bounty Hunter set of the Bloods gang.
Around the same time, Mr. Gonzalez called his brother, Andrew Mendez, 17, and told him he had just been jumped by members of the Crips gang. He talked about wanting revenge.
“I’m always telling him, ‘Just wear the flag on our block,’” Mr. Mendez said of his brother, referring to the red Bloods colors. “But he goes to a Crip block wearing the Blood flag, so of course he’ll get jumped.”
Worried, Mr. Mendez interrupted a subway ride to Brooklyn to try to find his brother, but Mr. Gonzalez had stopped responding to calls.
Mr. Gonzalez’s uncle, Reynaldo Gonzalez, 54, said his nephew became depressed when he was young and his mother died. Mr. Mendez said his mental condition deteriorated after a bad car accident two or three years ago. “His head ain’t the same,” Mr. Mendez said.
He said his brother had many encounters with the police, and that “they usually just put him in a mental hospital.” Mr. Gonzalez’s father, also Jose Gonzalez, said that he was unhappy about how the authorities had handled his son.
“The police and how they handle people with mental health issues are wrong,” he said. “Something tragic happened, and I am very sorry.”
Just three weeks ago, Mr. Gonzalez was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and attempted assault, both misdemeanors, after the police said he swung at an officer, and then kicked out the window of a police van. The Bronx district attorney’s office said its prosecutors asked a judge to have Mr. Gonzalez held on a $5,000 bail, but the judge ordered him released. A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said prosecutors also requested bail on a case last June in which Mr. Gonzalez was accused of punching someone, but that a judge had ordered him released then, too.
Mr. Gonzalez, charged with murder, was ordered jailed by Judge Kim Wilson on Friday afternoon in a courtroom packed with dozens of fellow Fire Department employees. Prosecutors said he drove over Ms. Arroyo twice, despite knowing she was there. His lawyer, Alice Fontier of the Bronx Defenders, requested a medical evaluation. In all, the police said, he had 31 previous arrests, several of them for possession or sale of marijuana.
Mr. Gonzalez had probably passed Ms. Arroyo on the street outside their homes, where some neighbors were upset by the construction of the supportive housing shelter. Ms. Arroyo, though, focused on her work and her family. She taught a half brother, Joel Rosado, 30, how to deliver oxygen when he was training to become an emergency medical technician. When he graduated the training academy, he said, “she was ecstatic.”
“I did it because I wanted to be like her,” Mr. Rosado said.
So did two of her sons, Edgar, who is in his 20s, and Kenny, 19. Edgar failed a first test to become an emergency medical technician but plans to retake the class; Kenny said he was taking the course now.
About six years ago Ms. Arroyo met her boyfriend on the job, a paramedic in the Bronx. They often meditated and did yoga together, and occasionally crossed paths on the job.
Ms. Arroyo was the eighth emergency medical worker to be killed in the line of duty since 1994; the last was in 2005, when a lieutenant died after surgery to treat a hernia suffered on the job. In 2002, an emergency medical technician died after his ambulance was rammed by a drunken driver.
Robert Ungar, a spokesman for the Uniformed EMTs, Paramedics & Fire Inspectors F.D.N.Y. union, said that more than 100 members a year were assaulted on the job.
The union’s president, Israel Miranda, said, “Anytime you wear a uniform and it shows some sort of authority in New York City, your life is always in danger.”