Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences Read Online Free PDF

scene, John Carroll also examined the victim, making mental note of her as she had been found.
    Carroll was a first-grade detective in the Homicide Squad, a man of intelligence and experience held in high esteem throughout the department. Noting the victim’s injuries—including that she could notspeak, could not tell them what happened—Carroll stepped out. He wanted to speak with the people who could tell them what happened.
    They allowed Sophie Farrar to remain with the victim until the ambulance arrived. The woman lying in the hallway of 82-62 Austin Street still clung to life, so it was not a homicide investigation yet. But these detectives, all seasoned responders to violent crime, had too much experience to believe it could turn out otherwise. They called for patrolmen to secure the scene and for technicians from the Police Laboratory and the Queens Photo Unit.
    An ambulance pulled up on Austin Street at 4:25 a.m. Kitty Genovese, unconscious but alive, was lifted onto a stretcher. A shaken Sophie Farrar watched as they carried her friend away.
    After the stretcher had been placed in the back of the vehicle, the attendant closed the door and took his place inside. Per the standards of the time, the ambulance was not equipped with any medical devices or supplies (not beyond what could be found in the average person’s medicine cabinet). Even if it had been, there was no one aboard to render treatment. The function of the ambulance was to transport the injured. Emergency medical technicians would not become standard personnel in New York City ambulances until the 1970s.
    The commotion brought residents out of the warmth of their homes and into the bitter cold of Austin Street. In the ambulance now, Kitty remained isolated from her neighbors. She was no longer crying for their help, no longer sobbing and groping her way down their peaceful tree-lined street. Alone in the back of an ambulance, Kitty Genovese left Kew Gardens for the last time.
    LIEUTENANT BERNARD JACOBS, twenty-one-year veteran of the NYPD and commander of the 102nd Detective Squad, arrived in Kew Gardens at 4:30 a.m. As the highest-ranking officer present, Jacobs was in charge of the investigation. He took one look at the size of the apartment buildings surrounding the crime scene and immediately called for the assistance of duty detectives from the thirteen other Queens squads. As with all crimes, particularly of a violent nature, police began canvassingthe area right away, knocking on doors and speaking with passersby in search of witnesses. It did not appear there had been anyone passing by, given the time of night, but there were many doors on which to knock. Lieutenant Jacobs told them to start with the Mowbray, that big apartment building across the street.
    The onlookers who had come outside to gape at the red lights of the ambulance and the gray barricades going up around the parking lot represented only the start of the work that lay ahead. In an area so densely populated, it was possible there were witnesses who had not ventured out—nor would, willingly.
    But Kew Gardens was one of the good neighborhoods. Detectives and officers who worked the area knew this. Despite its considerable population, which had jumped dramatically over the past two decades, and though only a twenty-minute train ride from Manhattan, Kew Gardens looked more suburban than big city, with its clean streets, the absence of graffiti, and the upscale architecture. You could tell just by looking around that a good class of people lived here. Detectives and officers knew that Kew Gardens wasn’t like some of the crime-ridden ghettos up in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or parts of Manhattan. A murder here was an unusual thing, let alone one like this, a brutal knife slaying of a girl. In this city, there were bad neighborhoods where the police wouldn’t get any cooperation. Half the residents were criminals themselves , for God’s sake, the others too scared to talk. Some might