Cabbie Killer Gets Four Decades
Seventeen years after the murder of a Bushwick cab driver, the convicted killer was sentenced to serve 43 years in a federal prison, law enforcement sources announced last Friday, Oct. 3.
Federal jurors found Elvin Hill, 35, guilty in January of this year in the murder of driver Fredy Cuenca in June 1997. The sentence was imposed last Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto.
The murder occurred sometime during the afternoon of June 29, 1997, after Cuenca picked up Hill and another person and was directed to park near a schoolyard on Eldert Street in Bushwick.
After arriving, Hill and Cuenca began to argue over the fare. Hill then took a .380 caliber firearm he had concealed and pointed it at back of the drivers head.
Reportedly, Cuenca who spoke broken English, pled for his life and pointed to a photograph of his two young sons he kept on the dashboard.
Even so, Hill shot the driver in the head, and both he and the other individual fled the scene.
Cuenca’s brother-in-law, also a cab driver, discovered the victim bleeding and took him to a hospital, where he later died.
Although investigators had identified the suspects, there was not enough evidence to charge them with the murder in 1997, authorities noted. Several years later a federal investigator that had been assigned to the case gathered additional evidence and Hill was indicted by a federal grand jury in March 2012.
United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch, and Assistant Director-in-Charge of the FBI New York Field Office George Venizelos announced the sentence. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States District Attorneys Daniel Silver and Seth DuChame.
