A Tale Of Mayhem, Madness, And Mourners

And, do you know the name of the girl who took your order?
Yes. Anita.
Although hardly audible, the name brought an immediate swelling of tears to the eyes of Joan Truman-Smith. Sitting eight rows back from the man who moments earlier confessed to putting a bullet in the skull of her 22-year-old daughter, Truman-Smith could no longer hold back the grief that had consumed her since May 24.
Consoling her in a way only few could understand, Benjamin Nazario, whose brother Ramon lost his life inside the icy freezer of the Main Street, Flushing eatery, turned to Truman-Smith and placed his hand on the grieving mothers shoulder.
"I know, I know," Nazario repeated in a soft, benign tone.
As the attention attempted to return to the court proceedings, Masters words were drowned out by a now seemingly inconsolable Truman-Smith. The anguished matriarch hurried from the courtroom, her deafening screams echoing ominously from the hallway. A quick scan of the eyes of several distraught onlookers confirmed my suspicions; sobbing was contagious. One by one, friends and family of the victims, gathered to hear whether Godineaux and John Taylor would face the death penalty for their part in the ghastly assassination-style slaughter, began to weep openly.
When you got downstairs, were other people down there?
Yes.
Who was there?
The seven employees.
After all those workers were taped, what happened next?
He told me stand everyone up.
After everyone was standing, what did you do next?
He told everyone to go in the freezer.
What happened then, once they were in the freezer lying down? Did you and John come into the freezer?
Yes. He pulled the bags over their head.
Why were the bags placed on their heads?
He didnt want the blood to splatter.
The gory description left many in the momentarily silent courtroom motionless, unable to truly fathom the horrors they were about to recount, yet again.
After John shot the manager, did anything happen with any of the other workers?
He shot a young lady.
After John shot the lady, did there come a time that you got the gun?
He told meyes, he told me to finish the job.
When John said finish the job, what did that mean to you?
He wanted me to do what he just did, and shoot everybody.
The icy-cold confession sent chills up and down my spine and propelled the Nazario family into the quiet sanctity of the courthouse foyer, far from the piercing testimony that tore through them like a knife.
A young boy, no older than 10, looked up at me, tears dripping from his brown eyes and across his swelling, adolescent cheeks, and stared. His confused blank glare echoed the sentiments of all who had witnessed the days proceedings.
Why?
Moments earlier, a stunned and disbelieving courtroom heard the news that Craig Godineaux had received a reprieve on his life. After consulting with several experienced forensic psychologists, Masters revealed that the court had deemed Godineaux mentally retarded, with significantly sub-average intellectual functioning, placing him in the lowest one percentile of the population. Godineauxs limited mental capacity exempts him from capital punishment status in New York State.
"The conclusion that he is mentally retarded is inescapable under the law," said Queens District Attorney Richard Brown in a prepared statement. (For more on Browns statement, see page 11.) "Therefore, it is in the interests of justice and the interests of the people in this county, as well as those bereaved families, that Godineaux promptly takes responsibility for his evil deeds, admit his guilt and be imprisoned for the rest of his natural life."
Godineauxs attorneys then informed Judge Steven Fisher that their client, eight months after perpetrating one of the most heinous crimes in the boroughs history, and faced with a mountain of physical evidence, including a surveillance videotape of the two robbing the store, would now change his plea to guilty.
Unable to put Godineaux to death, Fisher informed the 63," 200-pound felon that he would be sentenced to serve five consecutive life sentences in prison, one for each of the lives he had so brutally taken last Spring.
"I am going to send you to prison for the rest of your life," Fisher sternly told a sullen Godineaux. "And, you will never get out while you are alive."
Taylor, the purported "brains" of an operation that allotted just a few hundred dollars in cash, may not get the opportunity to get as comfortable to his jail cell as his accomplice. The rotund mass murderer was told he would receive a lethal injection of poison if he is convicted in the savage slayings of Smith, Nazario, Jeremy Mele, Jean-Dumel Auguste, Ali Ibadat, and the attempted murder of Patrick Castro and JaQuione Johnson. Taylor, stone-faced and silent, hardly blinked as his fate was left in the hands of a yet-unassembled 12-person jury.
"The aggravating factors involved substantially outweigh any mitigating circumstances and that under the law a sentence of death would be justified," said Brown, who himself does not believe in the death penalty.
Outside the courthouse, a media frenzy swirled around Nazario, who has in recent months become one of the more outspoken death penalty advocates in the case against Taylor and Godineaux.
"I feel cheated," Nazario said, as he called for a change in the state law, which saved Godineaux from a near-certain death. "There was no justice."
On a day permeated with sorrow and grief, and forever stained with the stench of anger and madness, to these families, justice never had a chance.