By Madina Toure
FLUSHING—A man who strangled and robbed an elderly man in his Flushing home more than two decades ago was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown announced last week.
Ernest Mattison, 52, whose last known address was 43-32 Kissena Blvd. — just around the corner from where the victim lived — was convicted last month of murder, Brown said.
The victim’s wife returned home from the store and found her husband, Cecil Schiff, 73, dead in their Franklin Avenue home Sept. 10, 1980. The bedroom had been ransacked and the jewelry boxes emptied.
In 2008, a fingerprint examiner concluded that Mattison’s fingerprints, generated by the Statewide Automated Fingerprint Identification System, matched those found on three of the jewelry boxes at the crime scene.
