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He’d attacked five women since April 19th.Īfter a six week-long trial, McCray, Salaam, and Santana were convicted of the attack on Meili, despite numerous inconsistencies between their initial confessions and the facts of the case. Reyes would go onto plead guilty and be sentenced to 33 years to life. DNA evidence linked him to other rapes, including Gonzalez’s murder. After raping her, he was caught by her doorman and a neighbor. Reyes forced his way into another woman’s apartment, also on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He raped and murdered her while her children listened from another room. Matias Reyes forced his way into the 97th Street apartment of Lourdes Gonzalez, who was pregnant and home alone with her three small children. The ads implicitly responded to Meili’s rape and the teens’ apprehension with a call to bring back the death penalty. But due to the severity of the brain trauma she suffered, she would never be able to remember the night of her attack.ĭonald Trump, then a local real estate developer and the best-selling author of The Art of the Deal, paid $85,000 to take out full-page ads in all of New York’s major papers. Charged as an adult, Wise was sent to New York’s notorious Rikers Island prison, while the others were taken to juvenile facilities.Īfter days in a coma, Meili began to regain consciousness. The boys were indicted on counts including attempted murder, rape, assault, and rioting. The boys soon recanted, and all five of them reported that the police had promised they could go home if they produced the confessions. Salaam wrote a confession but refused to sign it, and was implicated by other members of the group. But after hours of interrogative pressure from some of the city’s top homicide detectives, Wise, McCray, Richardson, and Santana gave signed and videotaped statements confessing to being involved in the attack on Meili.
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Wise, who suffered from hearing loss and a learning disability, was 16 years old, and could therefore be legally interrogated without a guardian present. By 11 pm, investigators brought more boys who were in the park that night to the station, including Antron McCray, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam. Police instantly connected the attack on Meili to the other, less serious crimes, that occurred in the park that night. The young woman was near death, having lost up to 80 percent of her blood. In response to the muggings and harassment by the group of teen, police apprehended five boys, including Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana, and brought them to the Central Park Precinct.Īt around 1:30 am, passersby discovered Meili in the park. While running a path known as the 102nd Street Cross Drive, she was hit in the back of the head with a tree branch, dragged off the path, and raped and beaten in an isolated section of the park. They threw rocks and sticks, and others beat a male jogger so badly that he had to be hospitalized for two days.Īround the same time, 28-year-old Trisha Meili entered the park from 84th Street and 5th Avenue for her regular after-work jog, running a path that took her northwest. Taking a southeast route, some of the boys intimidated and assaulted passersby. Authorities never followed up on this lead.Īround 9 pm, a group of about 30 teenage boys entered Central Park from 110th Street and 5th Avenue. After her attack, a detective consulted local hospitals for young men fitting her description, and was given the name of Matias Reyes, an 18-year-old who worked at a bodega near the scene of the attack. Here’s a timeline of the decades-long saga.Ī 26-year-old woman was beaten and raped in northern Central Park by a man she described as having stitches on his chin. The case is the basis for Ava DuVernay’s upcoming Netflix miniseries, When They See Us, which debuts May 31st. Five black and Latino teenagers, boys aged 14 to 16, were convicted of the horrifying assault, and would serve between six and 13 years in prison for the crime before the real perpetrator was found.
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Trisha Meili, a white banker who would become known in the press as the Central Park Jogger, was raped and beaten almost to death during an evening run in the city’s most beloved park. In the late 1980s, a brutal crime shook New York City.