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Our laws need to grow up

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Subway crime is not in our heads and never has been.

Very few New Yorkers remember Noel Perez, but his brutal murder on the subway nearly 50 years ago made headlines. As the train pulled into the 148th Street station, on March 19, 1978, a 15-year-old named Willie Bosket, who was already well known to the police, and his 17-year-old accomplice and older cousin Herman Spates decided to rob Perez of his wristwatch while he was sleeping. 

They never gave him an opportunity to hand it over. Instead, Bosket drew a .22-caliber revolver and shot Perez at close range through the right lens of his dark sunglasses. A second shot to his right-side temple finished him off. As he lay bleeding to death on the subway floor, the pair rifled through his pockets taking $20, a ring and the wristwatch that first drew their attention.

This was the start of an eight-day crime spree that would ultimately pave the way for juvenile justice reform first in New York and then throughout most of the United States. During a period of little more than a week, the pair committed three more armed robberies and wounded a transit worker who confronted them sneaking around a train yard. Lastly, they killed a second man, this time inside a subway car stopped in the 145th Street Station. Coincidentally, the second victim’s last name was also Perez, but they were not related. 

The net proceeds from that deadly robbery was just $2, the apparent value of a life in the perpetrators’ eyes. When they were finally apprehended a few days later, the 17-year-old, Herman Spates, was taken to Criminal Court to be tried as an adult. Bosket, on the other hand, only 15, meant that by law his case would be adjudicated in Family Court where it was disclosed that his father, whom he didn’t know, was a convicted murderer and his mother was abused by live-in boyfriends who also often threatened her son. 

Bosket was offered a five-year sentence at the Goshen Youth Facility in Orange County, New York, if he pleaded guilty. Seeing his cousin was facing up to 25 years in prison, he jumped at the offer and later said he could have kissed the judge for going so easy on him.

Governor Hugh Carey, a progressive Democrat, was up for reelection. His opponents had long called him soft on crime since he had long opposed treating juveniles who committed heinous crimes as adults. But the Bosket case and the subsequent light it put on his perspective, forced him to do a 180-degree turn. 

He immediately recalled the state legislature for an emergency session to enact special new laws to deal with juvenile offenders like Bosket. It was quickly passed and became known as “The Willie Bosket Law.” It allowed children as young as 13 to be tried as adults for committing violent murder and other dangerous felonies.

What makes remembering this case so important today is that we have another Democratic governor gearing up for reelection, Kathy Hochul, who is also being lambasted for her soft stance on crime. Decades from now, will we also forget Debrina Kawam, the 57-year-old woman who made the mistake of falling asleep in a subway car so that an undocumented migrant named Sebastian Zapeta-Calil could get his kicks by lighting her on fire and watching her burn to death?

She is the Noel Perez of our time. Perhaps Hochul will pull a Hugh Carey and finally be forced into action. Maybe she will recall the state legislature for an emergency session to draft new laws protecting New Yorkers by cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when the local authorities apprehend undocumented migrants who commit violent crimes or come to the attention of local authorities after being deported. It could be called the “Sebastian Zapeta-Calil Law,” or better yet, a new law could be named after the victim Debrina Kawam so she is not forgotten.

And while the governor is at it, she should heed NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s warning about the effects recidivist crime has on the law-abiding citizens of this state. Tisch put the ball in her court when, instead of parroting the company line, she said, “The criminal justice system fails to put the rights and needs of victims first.”

The candidate who does that will be the one who wins the next gubernatorial race in New York. Who knows. Maybe it will be Tisch.

Bernard Whalen is a former NYPD lieutenant and the co-author of “The NYPD’s First Fifty Years” and “Case Files of the NYPD.”

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