Police in New York City have collared
an eighth suspect in connection with a brutal string of anti-gay
attacks. A ninth suspect remains at large, NY1.com reported.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announced
Saturday that Elmer “Macho” Confresi, 23, had turned himself in
to authorities.
A ninth man, Ruddy Vargas-Perez, 22, is
also being sought by police for his involvement in four brutal
attacks that took place Sunday in the Bronx.
On Friday, policed announced that seven
members – two men, along with 5 teens – of a street gang calling
themselves the Latin King Goonies had been taken into custody. The
suspects have been charged with kidnapping, sodomy and robbery as a
hate crime.
The gang members attacked a 17-year-old
aspiring member after they learned he is gay.
The youth was grabbed off the street on
Sunday morning and forced into a vacant apartment, where he was
beaten and sodomized with the handle of a plunger. They questioned
him about his relationship with a 30-year-old man, who, along with
another 17-year-old boy, was later lured into the same apartment and
tortured. The man was also sodomized with a small baseball bat.
“One of the suspects said later the
man was beaten for hours and then dumped outside of his home,”
Kelly said on Friday. “These suspects had employed terrible wolf
pack odds of 9-1. Odds that reveled them as predators whose crimes
were as cowardly as they were despicable.”
The brother of one of the victims was
also assaulted, robbed and beaten in his own apartment.
At a press conference on Saturday,
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn
denounced the attacks.
“The crimes that happened in the
Bronx are unthinkably disturbing,” Quinn, who is openly lesbian,
said. “It's hard to remember a crime in the City of New York that
is more disgusting and sickening than what happened in the Bronx.”