‘How did you catch me?’
Hard work and MySpace
The Star-Ledger, August 19, 2007
The manhunt’s final chapter went by in a flash: no time for meals, no time for a hotel, no time for a shower. And certainly no time for sleep.
When it ended early yesterday at an apartment complex in a Washington, D.C., suburb, alleged murderer Rodolfo Godinez turned to the Newark cop who had been tracking him for 60 straight hours and starting asking questions.
“How did you catch me? Someone told on me?” Godinez asked Detective Rasheen Peppers. “You must be very smart.”
Peppers, 34, smiled wryly yesterday afternoon, recounting the story from his home in Essex County. A half-hour earlier, he’d kissed his wife and kids hello and taken a hot shower. In an hourlong interview, he sat down to explain how he helped find Godinez and Godinez’s 16-year-old half brother Alexander Alfaro — both alleged members of a Latino street gang called MS-13 who were wanted in the Aug. 4 execution-style slaying of three college students in a city schoolyard.
“Those deaths were tragic. That was our motivation to keep going,” Peppers said. “To me, those kids died at the hands of the devil.”
Sitting on Peppers’ dining room table was the black IBM ThinkPad laptop where his search for the suspects began Wednesday night.
On MySpace.
After being called into the case by Newark homicide detectives, Peppers typed the suspects’ names into the social-networking Web site.
Nothing came up under Godinez, but Alfaro’s profile was packed with clues: the boy’s nickname (“Smokey”), an MS-13 clique (Guanacos Little Cycos Salvatruchos), his picture (throwing gang signs while wearing a bandanna and sunglasses) and dozens of friends who had sent messages.
One message verified a crucial clue from early in the investigation: The boy had fled.
The next day, Peppers took an hour to build a bogus MySpace profile so he could try to strike up a conversation with Alfaro’s friends. For Peppers, a deputized member of the U.S. Marshals Service task force for the New York-New Jersey region the past five years, it was an online version of the old gumshoe technique of finding friends and neighbors.
The detective, now a day into a diet of potato chips, Gatorade and bottled water, spent the rest of Thursday trying to draw out the online friends. That night, the FBI in Washington, D.C., shared an informant’s tip that the little brother was indeed in Virginia.
Peppers, remembering the MySpace page had listed friends from Virginia, asked the FBI to hold off until he and other New Jersey members of the task force could get there. After packing, Peppers, Daniel Potucek of the U.S. Marshals and Lydell James, the lead Newark homicide detective on the case, jumped in a car. It was 3 a.m. Friday.
Once they arrived in Virginia, the FBI told them the informant had seen Godinez’s half brother in Woodbridge, Va., hanging out with local members of MS-13. Alfaro was with another gang member from New Jersey, nicknamed “El Guapo.”
“Guapo?” Peppers said he asked. “I know Guapo.”
Peppers went back to the MySpace list of friends.
Peppers showed FBI agents El Guapo’s pictures, which included some tattoos that matched the description provided by the informant.
Authorities — local police, investigators from the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, U.S. marshals, agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, homicide detectives and immigration officials — began staking out possible hiding places. Peppers said Susan Bzik of the prosecutor’s office helped identify the locations.
By Friday night, Peppers and others tracked El Guapo to a Salvadoran restaurant in Woodbridge called Bongo’s. El Guapo wouldn’t tell them anything useful, so Peppers pressed his partners to raid the seven or eight houses they had been staking out.
As they were preparing for the raids, James got a tip from another informant: Godinez was in nearby Prince George’s County, Md., where a black car was waiting to pick him up. The tipster said the car would leave at 2 a.m. Godinez would meet Alfaro and the two would head to Texas, then Mexico, then El Salvador, birthplace of MS-13.
At 1 a.m., investigators rushed to an apartment house in Oxon Hill, Md., about a 45-minute drive from Woodbridge, and raided a first-floor apartment with about 10 adults and teenagers inside, including several MS-13 members getting tattoos.
Godinez was in the crowd, but there was no sign of Alfaro.
Peppers and his partners called authorities in Woodbridge and told them to go ahead with their planned raid on a townhouse at Grist Mill Terrace. At around 1:45 a.m., they caught Alfaro walking out the back door. He didn’t put up a fight.
Godinez was sent to jail in Prince George’s County, and Alfaro was taken to a juvenile detention facility in Prince William County, Va. By 10 a.m., Peppers and Potucek were headed home.
Back in his living room a few hours before he finally had a hot meal of chicken and rice, Peppers said citizens should know Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Police Director Garry McCarthy and Police Chief Anthony Campos had let the fugitive team do whatever they needed to catch the two brothers.
“We’d do this for any citizen of Newark, not just those in a high-profile case,” Peppers said. “This happens all the time. Hopefully, this shows that your police officers and public servants are really out there trying.”