B’klyn woman begs cops to solve tot slay
Marchers protesting police practices on New York’s subways shut down a busy Harlem subway station during rush hour Friday, authorities said.
Accounts on social media said cops arrested about 20 people. A number of protesters were charged with disorderly conduct, police said without giving exact numbers.
Over 250 people converged outside the Adam Clayton Powell Jr State Office Building on W. 125th St. around 5 p.m. and marched east to the Nos. 4, 5, and 6 train stop at Lexington Ave.
“We are out here tonight because we keep us safe,” said a member of People’s Power Assemblies of NYC, which organized the protest. “We are tired. We are are fed up with the NYPD.”
Subway officials suspended service at the station in both directions for about an hour starting at 6:30 p.m.
The protest also led to the closing of 135th St. from Lenox Ave to the Harlem River Drive around 7:30 p.m., witnesses said.
A Brooklyn mother wept uncontrollably Friday as she called on police to solve her 1-year-old son’s brutal slaying — and insisted she had nothing to do with the death.
One day after the death of little Aiden Joyette was ruled a homicide, mom Alice Delacruz insisted in an emotional rant that she was in no way involved with the tiny boy’s violent demise.
According to the teary Delacruz, she was getting ready for work and preparing her daughter for school when she discovered the innocent toddler beaten to death.
“All I can say was that he was stolen from me,” the heartbroken mom told the Daily News three days after the death. “(It’s) like my heart has been ripped out. They stole my baby, they killed my baby. That’s the reality of it. That’s why there’s an investigation.”
Delacruz recalled finding her baby unconscious and badly beaten Tuesday morning inside their Winthrop St. apartment in Prospect Lefferts Garden. She started screaming and ran outside to bang on her neighbors’ doors, begging for help.
“Nobody answered,” she recounted. “I came back in to see my baby and realized he was dead. All I can say is that I hope he gets justice.”
A security guard in the lobby of the transitional housing residence called 911 for her. Medics rushed the infant to Kings County Hospital, where the toddler was pronounced dead — with an autopsy revealing the baby died of an “internal rupture” and the city medical examiner ruling the death a homicide.
Police questioned Delacruz as they tried to determine what happened to the baby in the days before his death. No arrests have been made.
“I miss my baby, I miss my baby, I want my family,” Delacruz said. “I’m cleaning out my house and just trying to stay strong for the kids that I have with me. I’m just heartbroken this is absolute hell.”
A neighbor, Stephanie Flores,
31, said Delacruz’s kids were always clean and welldressed. She said she heard screaming when Aiden’s father came to visit.
“Oh my God how could this happen?” she asked. “What happened with the kids? We were thinking about the kids.”
Delacruz, a nurse, acknowledged a problem with drug use in her past but insisted that she was now living clean. And she said the little boy’s father was not in the picture for the last year.
“I don’t use,” she told The News. “I see a psychiatrist every week. I’m active here, and I’m proactive about asking for help when I need it. I was just happy raising my kids and getting on the right track.”