Fernando Bermudez
New York
County, New York
Date of Crime: August 4, 1991
Fernando Bermudez was convicted in 1992 of the murder of
16-year-old Raymond Blount. Prior to the murder Blount had punched
another teen named Efrain Lopez, allegedly after Lopez looked at him the
wrong way. This incident occurred in the Marc Ballroom, a Greenwich
Village nightclub on Union Square West. Lopez then approached an
acquaintance in the club and told him what had happened. Later, at 3
a.m., outside the club, Lopez and his friends encountered Blount and his
friends. As the two groups were getting ready to fight, Lopez's
acquaintance asked him point out the puncher. After Lopez pointed to
Blount, the acquaintance ran up and fired a bullet into him, severing an
artery. Blount died in a hospital later that morning.
Police showed several of Blount's friends mug shots of young Latino men with
arrest records. Bermudez's photo caught the eye of one, and after
conferring with three others, all four agreed Bermudez resembled the gunman. The next day police questioned Lopez and he eventually told them the gunman
was named Lou but was called Wool Lou because he sold “wools,” slang for
crack cocaine. However, when shown a photo array, Lopez identified
Bermudez as the gunman.
Bermudez said he did not know the victim, he had no motive to shoot him, and
he was elsewhere with friends at the time of the shooting. However,
Lopez and the four other witnesses identified him as the gunman at trial. Lopez called Bermudez, “Wool Lou,” said he went to Public School 84 with
him, knew him to be Puerto Rican, and said Lou hung out near his
grandmother's building on West 92nd St. Bermudez had never been called
Wool Lou, never went to P.S. 84, was of Dominican descent, and lived on
204th St., six miles from Lopez's neighborhood.
There was a man named Wool Lou who lived in Lopez's neighborhood on West
91st St. and had a criminal record though not for dealing drugs. His
name was Luis Muñoz and his street alias of Wool Lou was in the Police
Department's files. Muñoz's facial features closely matched those of
Bermudez. Police never interviewed Muñoz or anyone else from the 92nd
St. schoolyard where Lopez and Muñoz hung out.
Witnesses had said the gunman was a light-skinned Hispanic, 5' 11" tall and
weighed 165 lbs. Bermudez was dark, 6'1" tall, and weighed 205 lbs. A year after Bermudez's conviction, the five witnesses against him recanted
their identification in sworn statements and said their testimony had been
manipulated by police and prosecutors. During Bermudez's appeals,
courts repeatedly rejected the five witnesses' recantations as incredible,
while selectively maintaining the same witnesses were credible in regard to
their trial testimony. However, in 2009, a Manhattan judge overturned
Bermudez's conviction and dismissed charges against him. The judge
found that no credible evidence connected Bermudez to the homicide of
Blount. [4/10]
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Reference: New York Times
Posted in:
Victims of the State,
Manhattan-Bronx Cases
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