Six years later, a murderer feels nothing

By Anup Kaphle and Sarah N.  Lynch

December 08, 2007

Raymond Mundo says he doesn’t remember the names of the man and woman he killed six years ago. But he does remember those of the two that testified against him in court. Their names are etched into his skin in small black script, one name on each arm.

“S. Duarte” got a spot on the right arm among the black and gray images of skulls and reapers that already covered Mundo’s arms. “R. Rios” managed to squeeze onto a small patch of clean skin on the left.

They are the ones who testified against Mundo in court in exchange for reduced sentences. They were the co-conspirators who betrayed his trust. It is their actions, after six years, that can still evoke his ire.

In jailhouse talk, they are the snitches.

“You must think I’m a monster, right?” the now 33-year-old Mundo asks with a smirk as he sits in the prison’s visiting room.

Mundo got the tattoos after he became prisoner number 04A2241 at the Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, N.Y. for stabbing two people on a $15,000 contract.

But back in East Harlem, the names that Mundo has so conveniently forgotten still cause co-workers’ eyes to well up with tears – especially now that the anniversary of their brutal death just passed. Their names were Carmen Quinones and Ruben Frederick, and until they were interrupted by a knock at the door around 9:30 p.m. on Nov. 30, 2001, they had been enjoying the evening with Quinones’ 3-year-old granddaughter, Ashley.

They were not acquainted with their two attackers, who stabbed them each 24 times.

They died never knowing that that the person who actually masterminded their murders lived two flights above Quinones in the very same brownstone.

***

The neighborhood where Quinones lived along East 101st Street is a small community lined with multi-colored brownstones. It sits wedged in between Park and Lexington avenues, just a short walk from the Museo del Barrio.
Quinones purchased her building in 1977 with her husband, Justino DeJesus. Together, they raised their newborn daughter Amy DeJesus and Derwin Cuadrado, Sr., Quinones' son from a previous relationship.

Even after she and her husband divorced in 1992, they continued to live on separate floors in the same house. They remained friends and, on occasion, exchanged gifts, prosecutors would later say.

Quinones was a common sight in the neighborhood, and was often spotted jogging along the sidewalks toward Central Park in her running suits. At 52, she was still thin and her muscles were well toned.

 

"If you didn’t know her, you'd think she must have taken 20 years off of her appearance," said Jessie Garcia, who is the mother of Quinones' only grandson Derwin Jr. and worked with Quinones at a nearby dentist office. "Her body was immaculate."

Quinones wore elegant attire and addressed people in Spanish w with "usted" - the more formal word for "you." Her poise and punctuality were the kind of attributes that Dr. Herman F. Salcedo was looking for when he hired her to be his receptionist at his Lexington Avenue office.

“She was a very formal person,” Salcedo said. “It was her upbringing. She was really a Puerto Rican as opposed to a Nuyorican.”

While many people on her block knew her, few knew the details of her life. She was a solitary person and very private - so private, in fact, that she did not use banks and kept her money hidden in an envelope under her mattress.

But she could not hide the fact that something in her personal life went awry. It was 1996. That was when the paint began to chip on the front stoop and the brownstone fell into disrepair - signs of the turmoil within.

***

According to court records, it started when Justino DeJesus reunited with Marianela “Maria” Santos, a lover from his youth. At 19, Maria Santos had fallen in love with him, only to be crushed when Justino DeJesus married Quinones instead.

Santos ultimately married Joseph Carrasquillo, a man plagued by a heroin addiction who died - leaving her alone with their only daughter Limary in their apartment on Monroe Avenue in the Bronx. But in 1996, Maria Santos re-met Justino DeJesus, eventually married him, changed her last name to DeJesus, and moved into the brownstone.

Until then, things had been going pretty well for Carmen Quinones and her ex-husband. The two mutually agreed in their divorce settlement to split the brownstone ownership in half. Carmen Quinones controlled the first floor and Justino DeJesus controlled the third floor. They rented the second floor to tenants and Quinones collected the rent while DeJesus was in charge of repairs.

 

 Much to Maria DeJesus' chagrin, the settlement prohibited her new husband or Quinones from selling their share of the house without a mutual agreement. And since Quinones showed no interest in moving out, the very woman who stole her lover many years ago was now her neighbor.

It wasn’t long before the things started to unravel. Justino DeJesus and his ex-wife stopped speaking, limiting their communication to handwritten notes in a hallway mailbox. Relatives say Maria DeJesus sometimes stole Quinones' mail.
Justino DeJesus stopped making his child support payments, forcing Quinones to get a lawyer to collect the $12,000 he owed. He ceased making repairs to the home, which grew noticeably shabby.

Eventually, Justino DeJesus turned on his own daughter, Amy, demanding that she return the keys to his part of the house. After that, they stopped speaking, court records say. In 1998, when Amy DeJesus gave birth to Ashley, Justino DeJesus never bothered to meet his new grandchild.

Things only got more complicated when Quinones began an affair in 1999 with Ruben Frederick, a 60-year-old married man from Brooklyn who had two adult children of his own. Frederick would eventually find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, trapped in a tangled web of jealousy.

And Maria DeJesus would be the black widow.

***

After about five years of living in the same house as her husband's former wife, Maria DeJesus decided she had had enough. Carmen Quinones had to go.

So Maria DeJesus turned to Rafael Rios, a chubby man with thick glasses and floppy hair who was known on the streets as "Doggy." Rios, a drug addict since the age of 12, used to sell her former husband Joseph Carrasquillo his heroin. He lived one floor below her old apartment on Monroe Avenue in the Bronx and had connections.

The two met at 10 a.m. at a Burger King in the Bronx near a methadone clinic he frequented. She asked him if he knew anyone who could "eliminate a person."

He promised her he'd try to find the right guy for the job. Three days later, he found the perfect person. It was a guy he'd known for years. A fellow drug buddy who knew how to dominate and take charge. A former resident of the same building who'd been to prison before on an attempted murder charge. A man who now claims he had experience with contract killings – killings for which he has still never been convicted.

That man was Raymond Mundo.

Mundo, who was 27 at the time, remembers the story slightly differently. He can remember Rios asking him to do the hit a year in advance. Each time Rios asked, however, Mundo says he turned the offer down. It was not his style to conduct a hit with another person. Mundo preferred to work alone. He usually worked through one middleman so that the person who ordered the hit could never directly link the crime back to him. Something about this contract didn't seem right to Mundo.

But Mundo didn't listen to his gut.

He accepted the offer, and ordered Rios to demand $25,000 from Maria DeJesus.
She later convinced Rios to bargain it down to $15,000.

Rios and Maria DeJesus met in a McDonald’s beneath the tracks of the 4 train at Burnside and Jerome avenues in the Bronx. She passed Rios a paper bag containing a $5,000 down payment and wrote down the names of all the people who lived in the brownstone. She also gave Rios a photo of Carmen Quinones, two house keys, the address where Quinones worked and a description of Frederick's white Ford Chrysler.

She told Rios she was taking the money out of the bank "little by little" so she could pay him for the deed, and she urged Rios to hurry up and get it over with. She wanted it done before her relatives from Puerto Rico arrived for Christmas. ***

The night of the murders, Mundo watched an episode of CSI – something he says he always watched to help him hone his techniques. He cut his hair short, shaved his arms and taped the wrists of his sleeves shut.

Although it was Rios' idea to accept the contract, Mundo soon became the grand puppeteer. He offered to give a cut of their profits to Sal Duarte and Javier Perez, two of his drug buddies, if they would help him out. They agreed, and he assigned them each roles. Duarte would be the driver. Perez was the lookout. He told both men he was planning to commit a burglary that night.

Only Mundo and Rios knew the truth about their intentions.

Mundo instructed Rios to bring a knife to the house. Knives were the only weapons Mundo liked to use because they are – in his words – “quiet.”

On this particular night, he selected a Pakistani hunting knife with a glass handle and a four-inch wide blade, which he bought at a gun show in Ohio years earlier for $500. According to Mundo, he always had a fascination with killing, and he owned an extensive knife and sword collection. But Rios, who was inexperienced in these matters, just brought along a small scalpel that he had stolen from a Home Depot.

Before heading to East Harlem, Rios and Mundo sniffed several bags of heroin. Mundo never worked a contract without it. When they arrived at their destination, Mundo used the two keys Maria DeJesus had given Rios to get through the brownstone's double doors. That was the easy part. Now, he had to convince Carmen Quinones to open the door to her apartment.

But Mundo had come prepared that night. He wore a dark blue trench coat to make himself look like a cop from the 23rd Precinct. He carried a pen and a clipboard in his hands, which contained the names of everyone who lived in the house. He even thought to carry a walkie-talkie, and he turned up the volume to make it sound “more real,” Mundo recalled. As Rios hid behind a stairwell, Mundo took charge.

Quinones opened the door ajar, although Mundo said she appeared cautious of him. He told her there had been a robbery in the area and he wanted her to look at a few photos of the suspects. She asked how he got in through the locked doors, and he rattled off the name of a tenant who lived on the second floor.

At that moment, Mundo struck.

He kicked in the door, reached into his trench coat and pulled out his knife. He aimed for her throat, but missed and struck her jaw as she instinctively tried to turn away. The door shut behind him as he forced his way into her apartment and continued to stab her again and again until she fell to the floor and bled to death. Out in the hallway, Rios could hear her screams.

Across the living room, Ruben Frederick stood up from his seat on the sofa. Mundo said he stabbed Frederick a few times in the chest, but couldn't penetrate his breastplate. Frederick reached down and picked up a large ceramic jar in self-defense. In that instant Mundo says he grabbed little Ashley and held a knife to her throat. He ordered Frederick to calm down. He assured Frederick he hadn't come for him.

But just as Frederick backed away, Rios barged through the door - high and sloppy. Rios lunged at Frederick and missed, ramming his head into the ceramic jar and cutting his forehead.

Now Rios' DNA would contaminate the crime scene. Although he laughed for a moment at Rios, Mundo soon grew angry at his friend's incompetence. He stood back for awhile and watched his partner in crime wrestle helplessly with Frederick, managing to stab Frederick in the neck only once or twice with his short, stubby knife.

"He almost got stabbed with his own knife," Mundo said. "You know, for a minute I was standing there contemplating if I should kill him, too." Now, he says, he wished he had.

But he decided against it, instead coming to Rios' aid and stabbing Frederick multiple times. When Frederick and Quinones were dead, they turned their attention to the last person in the room. Soon, a debate ensued over what to do with the girl. Mundo said he chose to spare her life "because she was too young to testify." He and Rios duct-taped the girl's head, face and hands and dragged her to the bedroom while Rios went into the bathroom to wash his bloody hands.

Mundo utilized his CSI skills yet again, this time grabbing the pillows off the couch and placing them on top of the large pools of blood that were forming. He walked on top of the cushions to avoid leaving footprints and wiped down everything he touched. Unaware that Quinones had thousands of dollars hidden under her mattress, the pair took some of the money they found inside an envelope in the bedroom. Mundo snatched Frederick’s cell phone and the gold chain around his neck before they headed back to the Bronx.

When they returned, more bad luck followed. This time, Mundo realized that Rios had left the pen from the clipboard inside the house. He made Duarte drive him back to the crime scene to retrieve it. He discovered Ashley asleep on the floor, cut some of the duct tape off her and instructed her to count to 100 before calling 911. He said he didn't want her to sit too long with the bodies.

Later, Mundo stayed at Rios’ apartment in the Bronx before heading back to his home in Willimantic, Conn., the following day.

In the East Harlem brownstone, the two bodies lay unnoticed throughout the night. Rios knew it was only a matter of time before police found his DNA and came knocking at his door.

But for Mundo, it was just another night.

***

Jessie Garcia was shopping with her 12-year-old son Derwin at FAO Schwartz for Legos on Dec. 1 when her cell phone rang. It was Amy DeJesus on the line, and she was frantic.

"She (was) really worried over the phone - practically screaming at me," Garcia recalled.

Amy DeJesus, who at the time was in Buffalo studying law, told Garcia that she had been trying to call her mother and daughter all day, but Quinones was not answering. After several hours of calls, someone finally picked up the other line. It was Ashley, and Ashley told DeJesus that, "Mama was sleeping."

Garcia hailed a cab and arrived at the house the same time as the police. She and the two officers knocked at the door. Garcia and her son called Ashley's name. At first there was no answer. Then Ashley peered out at them through the window.

It was too dark for them to see her face.

Soon Ashley disappeared from the window and went to open the inner door of the house. She ran into the hallway. Garcia could not catch a glimpse of the girl. But the officers did, and they ordered Garcia to stay put.

"The cop (saw) her. The cop (looked) at the other cop, and that’s all I needed to see," Garcia said. "I said, 'But what's wrong?' He said, ‘Ma'am, stand back.’”

Garcia doesn't remember much about what happened next. She knows she ignored the police's orders. She can remember seeing Carmen Quinones lying face down on the floor. She knows her son Derwin hugged her as she stood staring at the ghastly scene in the living room. She thinks he may have been the one to carry her out of the house.

"I regret the fact my son had to see it," Garcia said recently as she fought back tears.

The wounds that Carmen Quinones and Ruben Frederick sustained were horrific. Each had been stabbed approximately 24 times, although Mundo estimates he stabbed them about 40 times. He blames the heroin for the viciousness of the attack.

Frederick had slashes across his face and stab wounds that penetrated his ribs, diaphragm, liver and heart.
Quinones had a wound on her chin that shaved off a piece of her jawbone and several deep cuts on her neck, back and torso. Cuts on the palms of her hands suggested to medical examiners that she tried to fend off her attacker.

"She was trying to save her granddaughter," said Luz Cintron, an extended family member who grew up with Quinones." She didn’t want her granddaughter hurt. That’s why she fought like a cat."

When police discovered Ashley, she was covered in blood and she still had duct tape on her head, forehead, face, legs and ankles. A day or two after police discovered the bodies, Justino DeJesus called his estranged daughter, Amy. He wanted to know if he could buy the portion of the house she'd just inherited.

***

All that time watching CSI apparently didn't teach Mundo much. It didn't take long for the police to hunt him down, and that was not because of Rios' DNA. The cell phone he stole from Frederick served as a tracking device.

Two day after the murders, Rios and Mundo gave the phone to a drug customer named Angel Rodriguez who re-programmed stolen cell phones with new numbers. Rodriguez made a test call to the phone, and turned it over to an associate of his to re-program it. When the associate had trouble re-programming the phone, however, she gave Mundo back another look-alike phone and held onto the stolen one.

Later, when police did a search for all the numbers dialed on the cell phone, they found that someone had used Frederick’s phone to call Rodriguez’s house. The stolen cell phone led police to Rodriguez, then Rios and ultimately, to Mundo.

On Dec. 8, 2001, the police knocked on Rios’ door. At first, Rios denied his involvement in the murders. Then, after asking for a moment alone, he told police everything.

"I don't think Maria should get away with it," Rios told the police. "I wish I was dead. My life is over. I may kill myself down the road."

On Dec. 9, New York City police detectives headed up to Willimantic, Conn. where Mundo lived with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Fernandez and sold much of the heroin he obtained in the Bronx. Police soon found him at an apartment building on Spring Street.

“As we were checking the residence, he walked by and he looked the part,” said Detective Lt. Mary Beth Curtis of the Willimantic Police Department. “He had a hoodie on, so we couldn’t really tell, but it was really weird because he didn’t really look at us.

 “In her Spanish accent, (Detective) Giselle (Melino) said ‘Yo, yo, Mundo!’ and he didn’t turn around. And then I said, ‘Police. We want to talk to you!’ and the chase was on.”

Curtis ran after Mundo. When he got to a nearby intersection, he opened the door of a car sitting there, grabbed the woman driver and tried to pull her out. But she was about 260 pounds, and she wouldn't budge, Curtis said. Within seconds the police caught up with him.

He did not fight back.

Later that night, he signed a statement similar to Rios’ in which he confessed to his crimes.

Mundo now says police coerced him to sign it, telling him they would get him methadone to quell his heroin withdrawal if he put his signature on a page he never wrote. He also thinks he hurt his case by blurting out to police that he disagreed with portions of Rios' statement - lapses in judgment he blames on his heroin and ecstasy high.

A few years later, during his jury trial, the statement he signed along with Rios’ and Duarte’s testimony would be the key evidence that led to his conviction.

Meanwhile, several days prior to Mundo’s arrest, police were busy interviewing Maria DeJesus about her whereabouts the night of the murders. She denied knowing anything about the plan to murder Quinones - a claim she still makes to this day.

She didn't realize that Rios would soon give police a reason to place her at the center of their investigation. But it would not be until June 4, 2004 – more than two years after the murders – that investigators would gather enough evidence to be able to indict Maria DeJesus.

***

At La Santa Cruz, a cemetery in the Puerto Rican town of Arecibo along La Calle San Felipe, Quinones shares a plot with her mother, Moserate Martinez, who died just six months before her daughter.

Jessie Garcia says she’s the one who makes trips there. Last time she went, it was September and she brought roses. To this day, she still speaks to Quinones.

"I pray that God has her in Heaven because she's such a wonderful person,” Garcia said. “I pray for her to look after her grandson, to look after me, and just to lead him to the right direction."

Milestone events are still hard for the family. When Garcia's son Derwin graduated this past June from high school, he was crushed that his grandmother could not be with him. Garcia doesn't see Ashley or Amy DeJesus too often. Ashley is nine now. When she does see the girl, she's struck by how much Ashley resembles her grandmother.

Yolanda Concepcion, another woman who worked at the dentist office with Carmen Quinones, sees Ashley more often.

"She comes, and she's always (saying) 'You know my grandma?''" Concepcion said. "She has it in her. You can see it. She talks about it.”

The Frederick family still doesn't want to talk about what happened to Ruben. On the door of Frederick's old house, what appears to be a funeral card remains taped on the glass. "May God Bless the Frederick Family," it reads in Spanish.

"He was a great father and a great husband," his wife Carla said as she closed the door.

As the families prepare for their sixth year without their loved ones, Maria DeJesus sits in a cell at Bedford Hills, serving her life sentence. Her long, thick hair has turned gray. She doesn't want to talk about her crimes because she still thinks she's innocent. Her appeal went before several judges on Nov. 28, two days before the anniversary of the murders. As her case was heard, her husband sat in the back row of the courtroom, at one point closing his eyes and lowering his head.

Her attorney, Jeremy Gutman, thinks she should get a re-trial in part because she was convicted based on the statements of "people who made deals to save themselves that have particularly unsavory backgrounds."

This appeal is her best shot at a re-trial. Justino DeJesus said he’s not sure when the judges will make their decision.

“I don’t know. I’m new at this,” he said.

He didn’t wish to speak about his wife just yet, but according to some of Quinones' relatives, he’s hopeful about the appeal. He doesn’t want to see his wife in a giant visiting room under the close watch of prison guards for the rest of his life. He wants to have Maria DeJesus back with him in the brownstone, which he now completely owns.

"He’s still in denial," Luz Cintron said. “He still thinks she didn’t do such things, and that when she comes out, he’s going to close the whole block and make a big party and invite us all."

But Mundo’s father, Raymond Mundo Sr., knows his son is never getting out of prison. He partially blames himself for the way his son turned out.

“I wasn’t such a good example because I used to do drugs,” Mundo Sr. said recently. “We are like Siamese twins, me and him,” he added. “Everything I do, he does.”

Mundo acknowledges that his father’s tough lifestyle might have been a reason for his temptation to kill. The guns his father owned fascinated him and he has a vivid memory of the day his father shot someone’s pet German shepherd.

The apartment where Mundo spent his weekends does not look like a house with guns and drugs anymore. It’s is full of pictures of family members, plants and about a dozen finches in a tall cage in one corner of the room.

The only thing that seems off about the place is a long knife inside a leather pocket taped to the back of Mundo Sr.’s front door along with a metal whip – “just in case,” he says. The weapons hang beside a picture of Jesus Christ, although the family is not religious.

In prison, Mundo stares down at the names of the people he hates the most. But his arms also tell the story of the people he loves the most. Hidden under the sleeves of his maroon T-shirt are tattoo drawings of his three children, his mother, his half-sister and a man he grew up with who is like a second brother to him.

He says he understands why the families of his victims would hate him. He loves his own family, some of whom he rarely sees now . But he does have one family member in jail to keep him company. Mundo's younger brother, David, sits on the same cellblock at Great Meadow, serving time for a very similar crime. He pleaded guilty in 2004 to participating in an $8,000 contract killing.

He, too, used a knife.

For at least the next 25 years, they will experience prison life together. Then some day, if his brother is able to make parole, Mundo will be alone.

Mundo’s father said he thinks the family may as well consider Mundo dead now. When he said this, it was almost as if he was reading his son’s mind.

“Yeah,” Mundo said in prison the following day. “I wish I was.”