“I left,” he would later tell the jury. “I went home. I wasn’t happy about it. I was bothered.”
Just not bothered enough to tell anybody who could help.
And so Ramondo Jack put the incident out of his mind and went shopping, he told cops.
He will go through life knowing he lacked the spine to make an anonymous 911 call that might have saved a desperate girl’s life. Jack’s refusal to act reflects a shocking moral collapse in inner-city neighborhoods from coast to coast, in which witnesses to vicious, inexcusable crimes keep their mouths shut and refuse to notify police or cooperate in any way.
For a few witnesses, silence is borne of the legitimate fear of being harmed by drug dealers or other urban predators. But for many others, like the cowardly Ramondo Jack, silence is immoral apathy — a desire to appear cool and tough like the neighborhood gangsters, but in reality a weak-minded refusal to take responsibility for stemming the violence and chaos that have claimed countless lives and even entire neighborhoods.
The syndrome was on display in Baltimore in 2004, where drug dealers brazenly sold an underground video titled Stop Snitchin’. The video featured dealers flashing guns and openly threatening to kill anyone who might dare to testify against them. Startled cops used the video to round up and prosecute the dealers, but not before Stop Snitchin’ and a companion T-shirt became runaway hits in inner-city neighborhoods from coast to coast, including Brooklyn.
“The most frustrating thing is while you’re pulling your hair out of your head looking for the girl, these people directly across the street know — saw and know that a girl’s being tied up and held in the fuckin’ basement,” said Detective Mike Hinrichs, who took charge of the Moore case. “And nobody calls the police. Where are their heads? So far up their asses, I don’t know.”
About the only thing Ramondo Jack did for the doomed girl was to gently chide her captors.
“I was like, ‘What’s wrong with you all?’” he said.
Pearson and Hendrix just shrugged, and told him, “It’s already said and done. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Pearson and Hendrix were uneducated losers, the product of families so failed and broken that Hendrix’s grandmother did not know, or never cared to ask, about the makeshift torture chamber in her own home. Not even when Hendrix and Pearson lured a second woman off the street and raped her in the Snyder Avenue basement near Romona’s dead, battered body.
On the morning of April 28, 2003, the second victim, a fifteen-year-old student, arrived at school too late and found the doors locked. Hendrix was hanging around the building.
“He said, ‘Do you want to come and hang out with me and chill with me? It’s just one block in between the school and the house,’” the girl later recounted.
With that deadly snake charm the monsters could turn on, Hendrix persuaded the teenager to come with him. When the pair got to the basement on Snyder Avenue, the girl saw Pearson, the taller of the two, standing near a futon bed.
“The taller guy came behind me. I thought he wanted to come into the room, so I just moved aside,” the girl later testified. “And then he put the pillowcase on top of my head. They pushed me on the floor. They cut my book bag off, and they was taking, from what I felt, my shoelaces off my sneakers.”
She continued, “I was yelling for help. They told me that I should be quiet and that I shouldn’t act up because if I acted up they would have to kill me like they did the girl the night before because she was feisty. I stopped yelling and gave them my arms. They just tied me up and put a sock in my mouth and took the pillowcase off.”
The monsters told the girl about Romona. “While I was sitting in a chair, they had tape over my mouth and my eyes,” she told police. “He said that the girl’s body was behind me. And he asked me if I smelled it. And so he turned my head so I could smell it. I don’t know. It was a funny smell. I don’t know exactly what a dead body smells like.”
After raping the schoolgirl, Pearson and Hendrix fell asleep. Their victim managed to free herself, licking the adhesive off the duct tape that covered her mouth and loosening the ropes that bound her.
“I saw the taller guy by the futon [asleep] with a gun in his hand, and the shorter guy right by the door with a knife,” the girl said. “It was like a big kitchen knife. It wasn’t a steak knife. I tippy-toed out of the room.”
And finally, someone called the cops.
Police didn’t connect the fifteen-year-old’s rape story with the disappearance of Romona Moore until an anonymous tipster called Romona’s mother, Elle Carmichael, with chilling information.
“He told me that he heard a girl screaming a few nights ago. Then he told me something about Snyder Avenue. I was overwhelmed,” Carmichael testified. “I was hearing him, not hearing him. He was being really specific. He said they wrapped her up in plastic, and I think they killed her.”
The caller was the uncle of Ramondo Jack, the visitor who’d seen Romona in her final hours alive. Jack, who never contacted the police, eventually told his uncle what he’d seen, and the older man called Carmichael to tell her where to look for her daughter’s body.
Carmichael notified the police, then set out for the place the tipster had indicated, an abandoned house on Kings Highway. She got to Romona’s body minutes before the police arrived.
All this happened on May 11, 2003. Mother’s Day.
The most veteran, crime-weary detectives assigned to the Romona Moore case were stunned by the violence she had suffered.
“They shattered her jaw. Completely almost knocked it off her head,” said Detective Wayne Carey.
“Her whole face is gone between the maggots and everything else,” said another detective at the crime scene.
According to the medical examiner’s office, the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head and chest, the result of being assaulted with a hammer.
“They had a hammer and a saw, and they used it on Romona. Well, all of us were starting to feel sick,” said Detective Hinrichs of the Brooklyn South homicide squad. Hinrichs is the NYPD’s most decorated officer.
“Getting killed is one thing,” he said. “But when you start to think what could have happened to this girl — what did happen. All of us have worked hundreds and hundreds of cases and had never seen anything this horrible.”
As Carey and Hinrichs began the grim task of working with NYPD forensics experts to find blood, teeth, and bone fragments to serve as evidence, Caribbean community leaders began taking the cops to task over how the case was handled.
For Carmichael, the problems began the minute she reported her daughter’s disappearance.
“It was total disrespect. All I got from the police was that if my child is out there and she don’t want to come back, you know, she don’t have to come back. No one came. No one called,” she told ABC News. “They had already said there was nothing they could do. And there was nothing they would do because she was twenty-one.”
Patrick Patterson, Romona’s uncle, said no amount of arguing by family members could convince cops to mount an immediate, sweeping search for Romona.
“They just brushed us off,” he said, “telling us, ‘Look, she’s gone somewhere with some male companion, she’s an adult.’ We kept on pleading with them, telling them she’s not the kind of person who would do such a thing. We pay taxes like everybody else. Why is there a double standard?”
By double standard, Patterson put his finger on a longstanding grievance in black communities: The police and New York media often give saturation coverage to missing-person cases when the suspected victim is young, white, wealthy, and living in Manhattan. In neighborhoods like East Flatbush, the treatment is very different: Pictures of missing black girls do not get splashed on the front pages, and police task forces do not instantly spring into action.