Murder of Romona Moore

Romona Moore was a 21-year-old Hunter College honors student living with her family in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York. Born in Guyana on October 8, 1981, she had immigrated with her parents and was, at the time of her disappearance, a third-year psychology honors student described as a responsible high achiever.

On April 24, 2003, at approximately 7:30 p.m., Moore left home to meet a friend. She left that friend around 9:00 p.m., saying she intended to eat at a Burger King at Church and Remsen avenues, but she never arrived and was not seen again by family or friends. When her mother, Ellie Carmichael, reported her missing the next day, police suggested she might be with friends and declined to open a case; the family posted their own fliers, and police did not formally open an investigation until April 28. Around this time, police in Manhattan were separately publicizing the disappearance of Svetlana Aronov, a rare book dealer, whose body was later found in the East River.

Several days after Moore vanished, a 15-year-old girl reported to police that she had been abducted by two men, taken to an empty house, and raped before escaping. Approximately two months after Moore's disappearance, her mother received an anonymous phone call directing her to an address on Kings Highway; the caller was never identified. Police searched an abandoned, burned house at the location and found Moore's nude body, wrapped in a blanket, outside the structure. She had been severely beaten about the head and chest, and the basement had been flooded in an apparent attempt to destroy forensic evidence.

Two men, Troy Hendrix and Kayson Pearson, were arrested, aided in part by the 15-year-old's report. They were indicted on charges including first-degree murder, kidnapping, rape, and torture; the death penalty, initially sought, was dropped following a 2004 court ruling. At trial, prosecutors described days of captivity, rape, and torture with a knife, saw, hammer, and barbell. A witness, Romando Jack, testified he had seen Moore chained and held captive in a basement but did not report it to police at the time. On January 19, 2006, during the initial trial, Pearson stabbed his attorney and Hendrix attempted to seize a bailiff's gun; both were subdued, leading to a mistrial and additional charges. In a second trial, on March 23, 2006, both men were convicted of kidnapping, rape, torture, and first-degree murder. On April 11, 2006, they were sentenced to life without parole, plus 22 years for the courtroom escape attempt. The two were also convicted separately of abducting and raping the 15-year-old girl.

In 2008, Carmichael filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD, alleging racial bias in the handling of missing-persons cases involving Black women, contrasting the response to her daughter's case with the response to Svetlana Aronov and to Imette St. Guillen, a white graduate student who disappeared and was found raped, tortured, and murdered around the same period as the trial. The case was cleared for trial by Judge Nina Gershon, but in August 2014 Gershon dismissed it, finding no evidence of a widespread, racially motivated practice within the NYPD.