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October 02, 2005
Sex offender guilty of murdering Yonkers boy
WHITE PLAINS — Sex offender Robert DeRosario was found guilty of murder and kidnapping in the strangulation of a 12-year-old boy who disappeared nearly seven years ago from their Nodine Hill neighborhood in Yonkers.
The 42-year-old DeRosario, the only suspect ever pursued once the body of Orlandito Rosario-Maldonado was discovered, lowered his eyes and leaned on the defense table but otherwise showed no emotion as the jury forewoman announced the verdict after less than four hours of deliberations.
DeRosario, already serving a 10-year prison sentence from 2000 for sexually abusing a dozen teenage boys, now faces an additional 25 years to life in prison when Westchester County Judge Barbara Zambelli sentences him Nov. 15.
Orlandito, a sixth-grader who lived on Poplar Street, disappeared near DeRosario's Walnut Street apartment Nov. 2, 1998, after leaving his brothers on a trip to the barbershop so he could go buy a laser toy.
His badly decomposed body was discovered Jan. 23, 1999, near the Saw Mill River Parkway in Dobbs Ferry, in the woods next to an abandoned Carvel store where DeRosario was known to hang out as a teenager.
Prosecutors Patricia Murphy and Perry Perrone could offer no DNA evidence linking DeRosario to the slaying but called six witnesses, including four prison inmates, who testified that he implicated himself in the killing during several conversations over the years.
"In this age of 'CSI' and forensic medicine it's clear that with good old-fashioned police work ... we can put together a circumstantial case," District Attorney Jeanine Pirro said. "And we can make sure that justice, however delayed, is not denied."
Reached at his home in Pennsylvania, Jose Rosario said he had never given up hope that his son's killer would be caught.
"It's been seven years, and I'm happy that I finally found justice against this person," Rosario said in Spanish through an interpreter. He said DeRosario should never be allowed out of prison.
Zambelli denied defense lawyer Marilyn Reader's motion to set aside the verdict. Reader argued that the witnesses were unreliable, that the prosecution had formed an "unholy alliance" with the jailhouse snitches, and that the lack of any DNA evidence gave the jury sufficient reasonable doubt.
Reader declined to comment on the verdict. DeRosario's mother and brother left the courthouse without commenting. Longtime family friend Corrine Kurtz shouted "It's (expletive deleted) injustice!" and added that she thought jurors had to have been biased against DeRosario because they knew he was in prison for having sex with minors.
The jury got the case late Tuesday and focused immediately on DeRosario's own comments the week the body was discovered. They listened again to taped conversations between DeRosario and Sgt. Gregory Vince, his cousin and a member of the Dobbs Ferry police, on Jan. 24, 1999, in which DeRosario said he had seen Orlandito with another man outside his building.
Then they heard the testimony of DeRosario's friend Jeff Ciruzzi, who said the defendant told him three days later that he had never seen the boy.
DeRosario had a home renovation business and lived in his mother's apartment, which was thoroughly searched by police the night DeRosario had that conversation with Ciruzzi. Dobbs Ferry and Westchester County detectives were focused on DeRosario from the outset, based on a handyman's sighting of the boy going into DeRosario's apartment the afternoon he disappeared.
Once they seized his computer, police learned about the time DeRosario spent in an AOL chat room, Westchester M4M, and the men, and boys, he met there. He was eventually convicted of sodomy for having oral sex with a dozen boys he had met on the Internet and in his neighborhood. The investigation also helped police apprehend eight other men who had sex with at least one of those boys, including Yonkers city official James Surdoval and William Chidester, a former Somers school board member.
One of his victims, a 14-year-old boy from Hastings-on-Hudson, was a key witness at the trial. He testified that he tried to break up with DeRosario in 1998 by suggesting an appalling fantasy — having sex with a boy and then killing him. DeRosario, he said, grew excited and suggested a house in the Catskills where they could act out the fantasy. DeRosario tried calling the boy 10 times the day Orlandito disappeared, and he testified that in early January 1999, DeRosario told him that he had done "what we talked about doing in the Catskills."
After he was sentenced in 2000, DeRosario told The Journal News in an interview at Rikers Island that he was targeted because he was a known homosexual and that engaging in sexual activity with teenage boys did not mean he had killed the boy.
He insisted the boy had been with the handyman, not with him, and predicted he would never be convicted.
"There's no way they'll be able to prove any murder on me. You know why? Because I didn't do it, and they know I didn't do it," he said then.
But as much as police thought they had enough to charge DeRosario in the homicide, the case was not presented to a grand jury until last year.
He was indicted on second-degree murder charges, and a second indictment this year added the kidnapping charges to reflect the prosecution theory that DeRosario had killed the boy after abducting him for sexual purposes.
"Good police work, great prosecutors and unprecedented teamwork were the factors that led to this conviction," Dobbs Ferry Police Chief George Longworth said yesterday from Miami, where he was attending the International Chiefs of Police Association convention. "Everyone working on it over the years was committing to solving it. ... The driving force in this case was that little boy who spent Christmas half buried in the woods."
Posted by Nealus at October 2, 2005 09:13 PM
