Hell Gate - Two Very Different Manhattan Murder Investigations

The NYPD spent countless hours and resources searching for a CEO’s killer, but has made little evident progress on the fatal stabbing of a migrant teen.

Max Rivlin-Nadler, Nick Pinto
4:56 PM EDT on December 09, 2024



On Monday afternoon, Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that a suspect had been arrested in connection with last week's brazen Midtown assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

At a press conference at City Hall, Tisch ticked off the staggering outlay of police resources that the City had devoted to tracking down Thompson's killer.

Around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday night, as the story of the murdered insurance company CEO was making national headlines, 17-year-old Yeremi Colino was fatally stabbed on the street in the Financial District, one of two migrant teenagers who were attacked by a group of three men.

Police sources told the New York Post and amNewYork that the attackers had asked the migrants if they spoke English, and when the migrants answered no, began stabbing them. Colino was stabbed in the torso, and was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital that night. His companion was wounded in the arm. The murder happened on John Street, a few short blocks from the New York Stock Exchange and the World Trade Center.

The NYPD's press shop issued a brief email notice of Colino's murder Thursday night, and hasn't mentioned it again. The NYPD's Crime Stoppers site makes no mention of the incident, and no pictures of the three attackers have been released, despite the fact that the incident took place a couple blocks from the World Trade Center site, well within the area covered by the surveillance cameras of the NYPD's Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. Businesses up and down the block have their own security cameras trained on the street as well. When Hell Gate asked the NYPD on Monday whether there were any updates to the case or images of the attackers to be shared with the public, police said there were not.

All of which raises the question: Is every life valued equally in New York City, or did the NYPD expend exponentially more resources chasing the killer of a corporate CEO than it did the killer of a migrant teen?

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