Posted on 05/04/2005 10:36:52 AM PDT by chris1
Murder suspect living in U.S. illegally, police say
By STEVE LIEBERMAN slieberm@thejournalnews.com THE JOURNAL NEWS
Age: 29.
Education: High school graduate from Quesada, Guatemala.
? October 2000: Entered the United States legally on a tourist visa, which allowed him to stay for six months. He overstayed the visa.
? Came to Rockland from California within the past three years.
? July 2002: Charged with misdemeanor assault in Ramapo, under the name Ronald Douglas. He was accused of beating his girlfriend.
? September 2002: Justice Court warrant issued for his arrest when he missed a court date.
? 2005: Worked steadily for another contractor before joining Coloron Painting of New Jersey a month ago.
(Original publication: May 4, 2005)
A Guatemalan citizen charged with murdering a New City mother had lived in the United States illegally since 2001, when he overstayed his six-month tourist visa, Clarkstown police said yesterday.
Detectives confirmed the identity yesterday of Ronald Douglas Herrera Castellanos, 29, accused of Friday's slaying of Mary Nagle, 42. Police received the identification information from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Herrera has been charged with first- and second-degree murder in Nagle's slaying.
Herrera entered the United States in October 2000 on a tourist visa, which allowed him to stay for six months before he would have to return to Guatemala, Detective Lt. Charles Delo of the Clarkstown police said yesterday.
The suspect's visa didn't expire until October 2010, which meant he could have returned to the United States at any time until then.
Shawn Saucier, a spokesman for U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, said it was common for people to overstay their visas, probably accounting for a good portion of the estimated 8 million to 12 million people living illegally in the United States.
"If you can get a multi-entry visa to enter the country for six months and even ask for an extension, why would you enter the country illegally?" Saucier said. "If someone doesn't leave within six months, they are in violation of the terms of the visa."
Herrera's legal status in the United States is secondary to the slaying, Delo said.
"His legality in the country is not an issue in this case," Delo said. "Getting the suspect caught and seeing that justice is done is our concern."
Other officers found Nagle's cell phone and wallet yesterday in the woods behind Georgetown Oval, about a mile from the Nagles' Tamarac Avenue house.
During a nearly four-hour police manhunt Friday, 51 calls were made from Nagle's cell phone to her friends and family by a caller scrolling through the telephone numbers stored in the phone's memory. The caller threatened some with death and told others lurid details about raping Nagle, Delo said.
Herrera is being held in the county jail without bail. A grand jury will hear the case tomorrow for a possible indictment.
Yesterday, police again scoured the banks of Lake DeForest and the grounds along the Reservoir Drive area for a black plastic garbage bag that Herrera was seen carrying from Nagle's property.
Police said they believe the bag contained bloodstained clothes worn by the person who strangled, beat, stabbed and raped Nagle inside her house. When arrested, police said, Herrera was wearing clothes owned by Nagle's husband, Daniel, 41, a Manhattan accountant.
"We don't know if he buried the bag or threw it into the water," Delo said. "We were out on a boat about 80 feet, and the water was crystal clear. We'll go up again in the helicopter."
Nagle, the mother of two elementary school children, was home alone Friday, preparing for a tennis game with her sister, Ann Fallon.
For the past month, Herrera had worked for Coloron Painting of New Jersey. He had driven to the Nagles between 8:30 and 8:45 a.m. Friday to power-wash the Nagles' back porch.
Police said Fallon and Nagle were talking on the telephone at 8:50 a.m. when Nagle told her a worker wanted to speak with her.
Herrera is accused of entering the house through the back door and killing Nagle in her upstairs bedroom as she tried to fight him off, police said. All other doors to the house were locked, Delo said.
Coloron's owner drove up at 9:20 a.m. and when he didn't see Herrera, he power-washed the porch and left, taking the keys to the company truck in the Nagles' driveway.
When her sister didn't call back, Fallon drove to the house at 10:20 a.m. and saw Herrera outside, police said. When Fallon questioned him about her sister's whereabouts, he gave vague answers, claimed not to speak English well and left carrying a black plastic bag.
Fallon then went inside and saw a trail of blood upstairs and her sister on the bed, partially clothed with her tank top pulled up across her chest.
Nagle's slaying has had a chilling effect on the hiring of immigrant workers for landscaping, house repairs and maintenance.
Pedro Velasquez, a Guatemalan day laborer, and a number of other men said about 11:30 a.m. yesterday that they normally would have been picked up for work by contractors by about 11 a.m. They said this had been the situation since the weekend and attributed the lack of work to fear rising from Nagle's killing.
"It hurts us all," Velasquez said, standing with more than two dozen men on Spring Valley's Maple Avenue.
Leaders of the Jornaleros Project, an immigrant advocacy and assistance group, remained hopeful that Rockland residents would not turn their backs on day laborers.
The Rev. Angela Boatright of the Jornaleros Project said she hoped the tragedy would not prejudice residents against immigrant workers, though she understood the trust had been damaged.
"We regularly open our doors to workers ? handymen, painters, meter readers, food deliverers and the like ? and our trust in them is seldom violated," Boatright said.
"There is no race, class, or ethnic group that is exempt from the temptation to take a life," she said. "But for every horror committed and drilled into our memories, there also are dozens of acts of kindness. ... We must not lose our perspective. And, most of all, we must not fear each other."
Herrera, a high school graduate from Quesada, Guatemala, had worked steadily for another contractor before joining Coloron Painting, a Park Ridge, N.J.-based company that had worked for the Nagles and other Rockland families for more than 10 years.
Herrera came to Rockland from California within the past three years. In July 2002, he was charged with a misdemeanor assault in Ramapo, under the name Ronald Douglas, after he was accused of beating his girlfriend. A Justice Court warrant was issued for his arrest in September 2002 when he missed a court date.
When police arrested Herrera on Friday, his California driver's license gave the name Douglas Martin Herrera, 39.
Delo said the real Douglas Martin Herrera lived in San Francisco, and police there had spoken to him on Monday. He told police he didn't know the suspect or that his information was being used
I assume you are referring to the FOQNAs (formerly the FROBLs)...
As a student of history, I see scary parallels with the fall of Rome and the barbarian/Goth invasions with what is happening to us.
So am I.
The saddest part is that Dan lost his wife and those two kids have no mom.
I know about the housing.....I can't believe with no land either......$500,000/$600,000.....for ugly old houses!!!!!!! Just because they're 2 family.....I can imagine the illegals all over the place....too bad...it used to be fun back in the
late 70's/80's.....I used to work at Travelers which was next to that bar...I think the "Sunrise Inn" it....We
also used to go to the Candlelight Inn on Central Ave....and Bagle Nash was the big midnight munchee's place.
Can you provide some links to this "overwhelming effort" ?
Of course he won't (and can't). Being a troll (even one that claims to be a "Well-Educated Economist") means never having to respond to questions.
Protect our borders and coastlines from all foreign invaders!
Be Ever Vigilant!
Minutemen Patriots ~ Bump!
what are you going to do, make the argument that "small business" would be devasted without these low cost workers. you know what, let them go out of business. if a landscape service has to raise its price to hire legal workers, and the price they have to charge their customers goes up to the point they are unwilling to pay - let them either go out of business, or invest in automated mowing machines. either way, my lawn will get cut because I'll do it myself. same with contractors, if their costs rise and their customers are unwilling to pay - those people can fix their own homes. And if each of us has to pay an extra $2 for a meal at a restaurant, we'll pay it, we won't starve to death.
This argument about small business "needing these workers", taken to the extreme, would you also tell us we had to support slavery so these small businesses owners could have acess to zero-cost labor if that's what they needed to stay in business? at some point, the costs the society has to bear exceeds the value of these small business owners to the society.
Hopefully this painting contractor who hired this killer will be sued into oblivion.
yes, I would "feel better" (not that that term applies here, but I will use it since you did) if it were a legal immigrant, because at least we would have had some chance to do a screening process on that person before they were legally admitted. and to be honest, we are likely to get better candidates to be upstanding citizens from those who come legally, then someone who comes illegally. That's the way legal immigration into the US has always worked, and it has worked very well in the past. Its broken now because of the flood of illegals, we can't have an honest legal immigration system that we both agree the US needs, so long as we have this massive illegals situation.
Yeah, it's a typical...
Yours is the silliest comment that I've read so far today on Free Republic. Name one poster who wants to "lynch Hispanics".
She wasn't she was murdered, brutally, by an illegal immigrant and such murders and other violent crimes are now common everyday events in every city and state in the USA, thanks largely to people like you.
If we started the process of catching and deporting all of the illegal aliens who are currently in our country, it wouldn't happen overnight. The whole process would probably take a few years at least, perhaps longer. While we are catching and deporting the illegal aliens, we could start letting in more legal immigrants to take their places. In this way, employers wouldn't find themselves short of needed workers, and our economy wouldn't be negatively affected.
My stomping grounds!
THROW THEM OUT AND HAND THEM THE BILL FOR THE FLIGHT.
So, would this murder go in the debit column?
When the boomers retire, and all the illegals are evacuated under your plan, our economy will sink into a depression that would make 1929-1933 look like a walk in the park.
"Also, you don't have the slightest whiff of a clue, of what would happen to our lives if every illegal immigrant were thrown out of the country today."
Well, had they all been thrown out last week one woman would still be alive and two children would still have their mother.
The #1 problem with Bush's proposal (aside from the fact that it is an amenesty in a guest worker guise) is that it makes no provision for border security, makes no changes in the visa system that invites overstayers, makes no change in the ridiculous "lottery" system brought to us by Sen. Kennedy. Other than that, it might be supportable.
The current system, or rather lack of system, encourages law breaking by all sorts of people, most of whom aren't even really criminals.
And it seems we are stuck with bilingualism, which is too bad, because I never wanted to live in an Hispanic nation, and now I do. Look at Latin America and ask yourself, if that what you want America to become?
So that the baby boomers can get their SS and medicare, the rest of us have to live with these criminal invaders who are causing us to go the way of Rome in exactly the same way.
Wonderful.
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