The New York Times - 30.07.2019

THE NEW YORK TIMES NEW YORKTUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019 0 N A25

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FRONT PAGE

An article on July 11 about Jeffrey
Epstein’s personal wealth mis-
stated how Mr. Epstein came to
the attention of Alan Greenberg,
the chairman of Bear Stearns. A
parent of a student at the Dalton
School recommended Mr. Epstein

to Mr. Greenberg. Mr. Epstein did

not tutor Mr. Greenberg’s son.

An article on Saturday about

Jeffrey Epstein’s yearslong rela-

tionship with Leslie H. Wexner

misstated the name of an arts

center in Columbus, Ohio. It is the

Wexner Center for the Arts, not

the Wexner Arts Center.

INTERNATIONAL

An article on Saturday about

Congo’s new plan to fight Ebola

referred incorrectly to David

Gressly’s role in the Ebola relief

effort. He is coordinating the

security and humanitarian re-

sponse in Congo, not all of the

U.N. efforts. The W.H.O., part of

the U.N., continues to lead the

health response, in partnership

with the Democratic Republic of

Congo.

An article on Sunday about vio-

lence against gay men and lesbi-

ans in Poland misspelled the

surname of the United States

ambassador to Poland. She is

Georgette Mosbacher, not Moss-

bacher.

NATIONAL

An article on Monday about Dem-

ocratic voters’ perspective on

impeaching President Trump

misspelled the surname of a New

Hampshire Democratic activist.

He is Terry Shumaker, not Shoe-

maker.

SPORTS

A “Sports of the Times” column

on Sunday about concerns of

continuing doping in professional

cycling misstated the year of a

widespread cycling doping scan-

dal in which Marc Madiot was

questioned by the police. It was

1998, not 1999.

Errors are corrected during the press

run whenever possible, so some errors

noted here may not have appeared in

all editions.

Corrections

The New York City Board of
Elections on Monday certified
Melinda Katz, the Queens bor-
ough president, as the winner of
the June 25 Democratic primary
for Queens district attorney, the
culmination of a 34-day election
battle that was one of the closest
and most bitter in recent New
York City history.
But the board’s certification
does not end the contest: One of
Ms. Katz’s opponents, Tiffany
Cabán, has already filed a lawsuit
challenging the results, which
have her losing to Ms. Katz by a
mere 60 votes.
Nor does it end the identity cri-
sis that the race represented for
the Democratic Party. Supporters
of both campaigns have cast the
outcome as a verdict on the future
of the left, with backers of Ms.
Cabán, a former public defender
and democratic socialist, describ-
ing her candidacy as a rebuke to
machine politics, and supporters
of Ms. Katz, the favorite of Demo-
cratic leaders, accusing the other
side of aggravating polarization.
That battle seemed all but cer-
tain to rage on, even as Ms. Katz
claimed victory on Monday after a
two-week manual recount.
“This is a great day for the peo-
ple of Queens, who have waited
patiently for the long recount
process to conclude,” Ms. Katz
said in a statement. “While it is ev-
eryone’s right to avail themselves
of the judicial process, I urge all
participants in this hard-fought
election to come together and join
me in beginning the hard work of
reforming the criminal justice
system in Queens.”
But Ms. Cabán refused to con-
cede, citing the broader mandate
of reform that she had invoked
throughout the campaign, and
which propelled the race to na-
tional attention.
She said that more than 100 bal-
lots had been improperly not
counted, likening that to voter
suppression.
“This race is not over,” Ms.
Cabán said at a news conference
on Thursday, when the results of
the recount first became clear.

“Our campaign will be in court to

protect Queens voters from being

disenfranchised by New York’s re-

strictive and undemocratic voting

laws.”

Monica Klein, a spokeswoman

for Ms. Cabán, called the certifica-

tion a “formality” that would allow

the campaign’s lawsuit to move

forward.

That the certification was seen

by many as just a step rather than

a final result underscored the

topsy-turvy nature of the race. On

the night of the election, Ms.

Cabán had declared victory, citing

a 1,100-vote margin. But a delayed

count of paper ballots on July 3

put Ms. Katz ahead by 20 votes.

That slim margin automatically

triggered a manual recount — the

first ever to span a full county, ac-

cording to state elections officials.

Over the past two weeks, Board of

Elections staff members crowded

into a nondescript mall in Queens

tally every ballot by hand, while

volunteers and lawyers for both

candidates stood guard.

The recount process itself was

painstaking and dull. But it un-

folded against a backdrop of mis-

trust and mutual recrimination, as

Ms. Cabán’s supporters hurled ac-

cusations of voter fraud and sup-

pression. Ms. Katz’s supporters

suggested that Ms. Cabán’s back-

ers were gentrifiers inconsiderate

of nonwhite voters, many of whom

supported Ms. Katz. (Ms. Katz is

white, and Ms. Cabán is Latina.)

Ms. Cabán’s supporters have al-

ready pointed to the looming court

battle, when her lawyers plan to

argue that elections officials im-

properly discarded dozens of bal-

lots — more than enough to flip

the election yet again if reinstated.

Many of those ballots were in-

validated for technical reasons,

such as an eligible Democratic

voter showing up to the wrong

polling site, or not writing “Demo-

crat” on the ballot. Poll workers

are responsible for ensuring that

voters fill out affidavit ballots cor-

rectly, said Jerry Goldfeder, a law-

yer for Ms. Cabán.

Still, it is impossible to know

how much those disputed ballots

would change the outcome even if

they were reinstated.

It is unclear how long the court

proceedings will take. In 2012, a

special election for a Brooklyn

State Senate seat led to an auto-

matic recount; David Storobin, a

Republican, ultimately won by 16

votes, 72 days after the election.

In 2004, a race in Westchester

County led to the longest-running

contest for a Senate seat since be-

fore the Great Depression. The

contest between Andrea Stewart-

Cousins, a Democratic county leg-

islator, and the Republican incum-

bent, Nick Spano, set off a three-

month court battle that ended

with an 18-vote win for Mr. Spano.

Observers have given up on try-

ing to predict the outcome.

Jerry Skurnik, a longtime politi-

cal consultant, said he thought

Ms. Cabán would be hard-pressed

to make up a 60-vote lead with

about 100 disputed ballots. But

then again, he said, “I thought it

was hard to see how Katz could

overcome an 1,100-vote margin

with so few absentee ballots.

“I’ve been completely wrong

about this race,” Mr. Skurnik add-

ed. “So nothing will surprise me.”

Katz Wins, but Fight for Queens D.A. Isn’t Over

Melinda Katz was voted the new district attorney of Queens — by only 60 votes, forcing a recount.

MICHELLE V. AGINS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

By VIVIAN WANG

Since leaving his 1-year-old

twins in his broiling car while he

was at work on Friday, killing

them, Juan Rodriguez has been in

a state of disbelief, struggling to

understand how he could have for-

gotten to drop them off at their day

care.

Out on bail on manslaughter

charges and wracked with grief,

he told a close friend that he be-

lieved he had left the children at

their day care provider, even

though he had not. “He couldn’t

explain it,” the friend, Alfredo

Angueira, said. “In his mind he

dropped them off.”

Then on Sunday, Mr. Rodriguez

called David Diamond, a professor

of psychology in Florida who stud-

ies why otherwise loving parents

forget their children in cars. Mr.

Rodriguez could not understand

his own memory lapse, Dr. Dia-

mond said.

“He thought he was the only

person who had ever done this,”

Dr. Diamond said in an interview

on Monday.

Dr. Diamond said he told Mr.

Rodriguez that hundreds of other

parents have also left their chil-

dren in hot cars, with similarly

tragic results. It has happened to

doctors, accountants, teachers.

Since 1998, about 440 children

nationwide have died of heat-

stroke after being forgotten in

cars, generally not because of a

lack of love, Dr. Diamond said, but

because of how human memory

functions.

“I think this has helped him in

his time of grieving,” he said, “to

understand how it’s possible he

could do this.”

Mr. Rodriguez has not spoken

publicly, but comments by Mr.

Angueira and Dr. Diamond offered

the first insights into how he is

grappling with a devastating reali-

ty of having left his children to die.

Mr. Rodriguez, who lives in

Rockland County, N.Y., told the po-

lice he assumed he had dropped

the twins off. He said left the house

on Friday with the twins and their

4-year-old brother, Tristan. He

dropped Tristan off at his day care

before he arrived at work in the

Bronx at 8 a.m., put in a full shift

counseling people at a veterans’

hospital and had already started

driving home at 4 p.m. when he

discovered them still in their rear-

facing car seats, no longer breath-

ing, the police said.

He got out of the car and

screamed, alarming bystanders.

“I blanked out,” he told the police.

“I killed my babies!”

Dr. Diamond explained that

about half of the children who had

been mistakenly left behind in cars

since 1998 died in very similar cir-

cumstances to those of Luna and

Phoenix, Mr. Rodriguez’s children.

A parent or caregiver had meant to

drop the children off at day care or

preschool but forgot, leaving them

in the car.

July is the most common month

for children to die of heatstroke in

cars, according to data on hot car

deaths complied by Jan Null, a me-

teorologist at San Jose State Uni-

versity.

“It fits the same patterns that

we have seen in a lot of these for-

gotten-child cases,” said Mr. Null,

who founded noheatstroke.org to

try to save children’s lives. “It was

a good parent, who for some rea-

son, went on to work, and didn’t re-

member he hadn’t dropped off his

children.”

Creating a false memory that

the children were safely dropped

off is common among parents in

these cases, researchers have

found. Some parents have even re-

turned to the day care to pick up

their children, only to find them

dead in the back seat, Dr. Diamond

said.

The problem has worsened

since the mid-1990s, researchers

said, when safety concerns about

accidents led experts to recom-

mend car seats be placed in the

back seat and often to be rear-fac-

ing, leaving children out of view.

Such memory lapses, Dr. Dia-

mond said, have to do with how the

brain functions. When people

drive a familiar route, they tend to

go on autopilot, a habitual state

that allows them to multitask.

But being in that state also sup-

presses the higher-order part of

the consciousness that enables

people to remember they had

made a plan.

People forget children in cars,

he said, for the same reason peo-

ple might drive straight home in-

stead of stopping at the grocery

store, even though that had been

their original intention. It often

takes a cue to jar drivers back into

full consciousness and remember

what they planned to do. Stress

and sleep deprivation can make

these memory lapses more com-

mon, he said.

Pediatric death in a hot car can

happen fast. On an 86-degree day,

like it was last Friday, the tem-

perature in the car will rise to 115

degrees in 20 minutes. After 30

minutes, the car temperature will

reach 120 degrees, Mr. Null said.

Even with outside temperature in

the 60s, temperatures inside cars

can quickly hit unsafe levels for

children and pets left inside be-

cause of how cars retain heat.

Phoenix and Luna were found

by the medical examiner to have

had a body temperature of 108 de-

grees when they died, which had

caused their organs to shut down.

Most efforts to prevent these

deaths — which average 38 per

year nationally — center on re-

minding drivers to check for their

children. A simple idea is for care-

givers to sign a pledge to alert par-

ents if a child is not dropped off at

day care as planned.

There are also technological so-

lutions, such as a motion detector

that can discern even the slightest

movement in a car when a driver

leaves. The Hot Cars Act of 2019,

now before Congress, would man-

date the installation of technology

that at a minimum would remind

drivers to check the back seat.

According to Mr. Null’s re-

search, 54 percent of the 795 chil-

dren who died of heat stroke in

cars between 1998 and 2018 were

forgotten by their caregivers. The

rest of them had either gotten into

the cars on their own and were

trapped there (26 percent) — or

were knowingly left in vehicles (19

percent).

In the end, whether parents are

prosecuted for forgetting their

children in a car comes down to an

individual district attorney’s dis-

cretion. In Mr. Rodriguez’s case,

he has been charged with two

counts each of manslaughter,

criminally negligent homicide and

endangering the welfare of a child.

His wife, Marissa A. Rodriguez, is

standing by him, saying it was a

horrific accident.

Mr. Angueira, 42, who said he

had known Mr. Rodriguez for

about 20 years, described him as a

responsible father who had served

in Kuwait with the United States

Army until March 2017, when he

injured his leg. He then got a mas-

ter’s degree in social work at the

State University of New York at

Albany.

Mr. Rodriguez, who grew up in

Washington Heights and the

Bronx, still serves in the National

Guard. He has two other children

— aged 12 and 16 — from a previ-

ous relationship, and was a de-

voted parent whose Facebook feed

was littered with family photos,

friends said.

He drove to Albany every other

weekend to collect his older chil-

dren and would sometimes lunch

with his younger children at their

day care, friends said. Earlier this

month, he had rented a bouncy

house and a cotton candy machine

to throw a big party for the twins’

first birthday.

Linda Ruban, a friend who has

worked with Mr. Rodriguez for 10

years, said he has been unable to

eat or sleep. “ ‘I can’t believe that I

would forget this — these are my

children,’ ” she said he had told her.

‘Trying to Understand’

How He Let Twins Die

RODRIGUEZ FAMILY

Marissa A. Rodriguez, left, and

husband Juan Rodriguez carry

twins, Luna, left, and Phoenix.

How Parents Forget

Children in Cars

By SHARON OTTERMAN

and ANDREA SALCEDO

Andrea Salcedo contributed re-

porting.

The videos that emerged from
an Upper East Side event in Octo-
ber showed a disturbing scene:
about a dozen men connected to a
far-right group called the Proud
Boys surrounding and striking a
smaller group of protesters, be-
lieved to be self-described anti-
fascists.
Ten members and associates of
the Proud Boys, which the South-
ern Poverty Law Center has called
a “hate group,” were arrested as a
result of the altercation. And this
week, two are going to trial in what
appears to be the first time mem-
bers of the group, which have
clashed with left-wing opponents
in other parts of the country, will
appear before a jury to face
charges stemming from an attack.
Jurors, however, are unlikely to
hear from any of those who were
beaten.
The four victims have not co-
operated with the authorities, who
do not even know their names.
They are identified in an indict-
ment only as Shaved Head, Pony-
tail, Khaki and Spiky Belt.
Phillip Walzak, the Police De-
partment’s main spokesman, said
that footage from police body cam-
eras showed that victims refused
to talk with officers who sought
statements after arriving on 82nd
Street as the attacks were taking
place.
As a result, prosecutors have
been unable to pursue charges of
assault, which requires evidence
of injury. Instead, the defendants
have been charged with riot and
with attempted assault, which re-
quires only evidence of intent to
cause injury.
The Manhattan district attor-
ney’s office is expected to lean
heavily on video from multiple
sources that show the defendants
— Maxwell Hare, who prosecutors
said started the fighting, and John
Kinsman, accused by prosecutors
of being “the single most vicious of
all the attackers”— punching and

kicking protesters.

“The primary evidence before

the grand jury — and the only evi-

dence of how the physical alterca-

tion began — was video evidence,”

a prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass,

wrote in a court filing.

Daniel R. Alonso, a former fed-

eral prosecutor and former chief

assistant district attorney in Man-

hattan, said that trying a criminal

case without victim testimony

may be somewhat unusual, but is

hardly unheard-of.

“The law doesn’t specify any

particular method by which the

D.A. is required to prove guilt be-

yond a reasonable doubt,” he said.

The trial is sure to be watched

closely, in large part because it will

explore events that fit into a broad

pattern of violence defined by

clashing ideologies.

“This case involves allegations

of a violent clash between two op-

posing groups,” Justice Mark J.

Dwyer of State Supreme Court in

Manhattan told prospective jurors

on Monday.

Over the last few years, far-right

groups, often denouncing commu-

nism or calling for “free speech,”

have fought repeatedly with a

loose-knit coalition of self-de-

scribed anti-fascists known as An-

tifa, who say that the right-wing

groups are a threat that should be

countered physically.

Roiling conflicts — in places like

Berkeley, Calif.; Portland, Me.;

and Providence, R.I. — have in-

cluded the use of homemade

shields, clubs, batons and pepper

spray. In 2017, a participant in a

far-right rally in Charlottesville,

Va. drove a car into a crowd of pro-

testers, killing a woman named

Heather Heyer. The driver, James

Fields Jr., was sentenced to life in

prison in June of this year.

Members of the Proud Boys

were at that rally and have shown

up at other events attended by

white supremacists or extremists.

But leaders of the group — which

includes nationalists and libertari-

ans who oppose Islam, feminism

and liberal politics — say they dis-

avow racism and hate.

The Upper East Side incident

took place after Gavin McInnes, a

co-founder of Vice magazine who

started the Proud Boys in New

York City in 2016, appeared at the

Metropolitan Republican Club on

83rd Street.

Afterward, the police said, a

small group of protesters circled

the block attempting to intercept a

large number of Proud Boys walk-

ing south on Park Avenue.

A video documentarian, Sandi

Bachom, recorded part of the

fighting on East 82nd Street.

Footage from a man, Christopher

Wright, who accompanied the

Proud Boys that night, depicted

some exulting afterward, and Mr.

Hare shouting that he had

“smashed” a victim’s head.

The public reaction was swift.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor

Andrew M. Cuomo condemned the

Proud Boys. Its members were

banned from Instagram and Face-

book. In November, Mr. McInnes

said he was quitting the group.

Before that, though, he insisted

that Antifa members, including

one who threw a plastic bottle, had

ambushed the Proud Boys that

night. Lawyers for several defend-

ants made similar claims during

their arraignments.

But security camera footage ob-

tained by The New York Times

showed that members of the

Proud Boys initiated the encoun-

ter by charging at the protesters,

who had halted some 100 feet from

Park Avenue.

Five defendants have pleaded

guilty to charges including riot,

disorderly conduct and attempted

assault and been sentenced to a

conditional discharge and five

days of community service.

Another, Kyle Borello, pleaded

guilty to riot and attempted as-

sault but will be allowed to with-

draw those pleas and plead guilty

to disorderly conduct with a sen-

tence of time served if he com-

pletes 10 days of community serv-

ice and has no new arrests for a

year.

A seventh defendant, Geoffrey

Young, pleaded guilty to riot and

attempted assault and was sen-

tenced to 10 months of weekend

jail.

The eighth, David Kuriakose, is

expected to go to trial in the fall.

Far-Right Proud Boys Have No Accusers at Trial

In October 2018, members of the far-right group, the Proud

Boys, and anti-fascist protesters fought in a Manhattan street.

SHAY HORSE

By COLIN MOYNIHAN