Karen Bermudez-Rodriguez wanted to
break up with her boyfriend. And she
wanted him to give back her keys.
Ms. Bermudez-Rodriguez, a 26-year-
old au pair who lived with a family in a
New Jersey suburb, exchanged text mes-
sages with the boyfriend, Joseph Porter,
on Saturday at about 1:30 a.m., according
to court documents.
Less than five hours later, Mr. Porter
used the keys Ms. Bermudez-Rodriguez
had previously given him to enter the
home of her employer, and stabbed him to
death, according to the authorities.
He then bound Ms. Bermudez-Rodri-
guez’s hands. When she fled, he chased
her down the street with a knife.
The new details about the double homi-
cide emerged on Monday as residents in
Maplewood, N.J., a suburb 20 miles west
of New York City, grappled with the loss
that had struck the tight-knit community.
A memorial of bouquets and notes
cropped up near the township’s train sta-
tion. “I love you, Karen. Thank you for be-
ing part of our lives,” one note read.
Mr. Porter, 27, of Elizabeth, N.J., was
arrested on Sunday and charged with the
murders of Ms. Bermudez-Rodriguez
and her employer, David Kimowitz, 40,
who managed comedians and owned the
Stand Restaurant and Comedy Club, a
comedy venue near Gramercy Park in
Manhattan. Mr. Kimowitz’s wife and two
young daughters were out of town at the
time of the attacks, the authorities said.
Mr. Porter was detained on Sunday at
Newark Liberty International Airport
while, according to the police, he was at-
tempting to flee the country for Cancún,
Mexico. He was taken to the prosecutor’s
office in Essex County, where the authori-
ties noted he had visible marks and
scratches around his neck, according to
court records released on Monday.
According to the records, Mr. Porter
told officers that he went to a home on
Walton Road in Maplewood early on Sat-
urday and stabbed Mr. Kimowitz in a sec-
ond-floor bedroom. After Ms. Bermudez-
Rodriguez fled — her hands bound with
tape — Mr. Porter caught up with her on
the street, 300 feet outside her employ-
er’s residence, on Woodland Road, and
stabbed her with a knife.
The police responded to the area at
about 6 a.m., after a 911 caller reported
hearing people fighting and had ob-
served a woman being attacked. Ms.
Bermudez-Rodriguez was found lying on
the ground. She was transported to New-
ark Beth Israel Medical Center, where
she died. The authorities found Mr. Ki-
mowitz inside his home, where he was
pronounced dead. A knife was recovered
near his body, according to the affidavit.
The authorities said they had recov-
ered video at the scene that showed a
man chasing Ms. Bermudez-Rodriguez
down the street. Text messages the police
reviewed on Ms. Bermudez-Rodriguez’s
phone showed that Mr. Porter had been
upset about the breakup. At least one of
Ms. Bermudez-Rodriguez’s friends said
she had ended the relationship last year.
Friends and acquaintances remem-bered Ms. Bermudez-Rodriguez, a na-
tive of Colombia, as a quiet but char-
ismatic young woman. A photo left at her
memorial showed her posing near the
Brooklyn Bridge wearing an off-the-
shoulder blouse and black hat. A friend,
Valeria Rodriguez, had taken the photo a
year ago.
“We went there to bid farewell to a
friend, another nanny, who was return-
ing to her country,” Ms. Rodriguez, 27,
said. “She put that hat on and posed, be-
cause she loved taking photos. And she
smiled. That’s how I am going to remem-
ber her, full of life.”
She said her friend had moved to the
United States from Bogotá, Colombia,
about a year and a half ago, leaving be-
hind her mother and other relatives.Rosa Nieves, 28, an au pair from
Puerto Rico, said Ms. Bermudez-Rodri-
guez’s mother called during a heart-
breaking vigil in downtown Maplewood
on Sunday and thanked the young wom-
en for honoring her daughter’s life.
“Her mother called us on FaceTime
during the vigil. It was very emotional.
She understood that we all come here
from other places and feel alone. We be-
come each others’ families,” Ms. Nieves
said. “Her mom told us, ‘Thank you for
being there for my daughter. I love you
all.’ We all cried.”
Ms. Bermudez-Rodriguez was paired
with the Kimowitz family through an
agency, AuPairCare, and other nannies
said she became well-known in the local
au pair community — a group that oftensocializes on the week-
ends.
“She enjoyed being
an au pair and was
grateful to have such a
lovely host family,”
read a statement
posted on a Facebook
fund-raiser page that
was set up by several
au pairs. “She espe-
cially cherished her
time with her host fam-
ily’s daughters and
loved them very much.
Karen had pursued the
au pair program to ad-
vance her English
skills and to travel,
which she loved.”
The fund was created to help Ms.
Bermudez-Rodriguez’s family retrieve
the body and bury her in Colombia, ac-
cording to the Facebook page. A memori-
al service will be held for her Wednesday
at Morrow Memorial United Methodist
Church in Maplewood. A funeral service
for Mr. Kimowitz will take place the same
day at Bernheim-Apter-Kreitzman Sub-
urban Funeral Chapel in Livingston, N.J.
Those who knew Mr. Porter are
shocked at the charges he now faces. Vic-
tor Toro, a superintendent at the Eliza-
beth, N.J., building where Mr. Porter
lived with his mother, said he saw him of-
ten walking in and out of the apartment
with his girlfriend.
“She was always really quiet, next to
him,” Mr. Toro said.
He said he frequently asked Mr. Porter
to move his car, because he tended to
park in the wrong spot, and Mr. Porter
never expressed any anger.
“He always obeyed,” Mr. Toro said. “He
did as I told him. He was a well-com-
posed, quiet young man. He never yelled
or talked back to me. This is why what he
did shocked me.”Authorities Say Jilted Love
Spurred New Jersey Killings
Joseph Porter, inset, let himself into the home of David Kimowitz, where Kar-
en Bermudez-Rodriguez lived and worked as an au pair, according to court
documents. Mr. Porter was arrested on Sunday charged with their murders.BRYAN ANSELM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESBy CORINA KNOLL
and EDGAR SANDOVALAndrea Salcedo contributed reporting.
Cesar A. Sayoc Jr., the fervent sup-
porter of President Trump who rattled
the nation last fall when he sent home-
made pipe bombs to former President
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and
other prominent Democrats, was sen-
tenced on Monday to 20 years in prison.
Mr. Sayoc pleaded guilty in March to
mailing 16 bombs to people he consid-
ered to be Mr. Trump’s enemies. The
F.B.I. said the devices were packed with
powder from fireworks, fertilizer, a pool
chemical and glass fragments that
would function as shrapnel, but they
would not have worked as designed.
In the end, the flaws in the bombs’ de-
sign were critical to a federal judge’s de-
cision to give Mr. Sayoc 20 years in pris-
on rather than the life sentence prosecu-
tors requested. The judge, Jed S. Rakoff
of Federal District Court in Manhattan,
said he had concluded that Mr. Sayoc,
though no firearms expert, was capable
of concocting a pipe bomb that could ex-
plode and had consciously chosen not to.
“He hated his victims,” the judge said.
“He wished them no good, but he was
not so lost as to wish them dead, at least
not by his own hand.”
Though the timing was coincidental,
the sentencing came as the nation was
on edge after the weekend’s back-to-
back mass shootings, one of which ap-
peared to have been inspired by anti-im-
migrant rhetoric from right-wing pun-
dits and politicians, including Mr.
Trump.
On Monday morning, Mr. Trump gave
a national address in which he de-
nounced white supremacists and said
hatred had no place in the country. He
promised the government would do
more to keep guns out of the hands of the
mentally ill.
Still, the president has a long history
of making inflammatory statements not
just about immigrants, but about his po-
litical opponents. Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers
said their client was particularly suscep-
tible to those ideas.
Indeed, the lawyers argued in a recent
court filing that Mr. Sayoc, 57, suffered
from a long-untreated mental illness and
drew inspiration from the president for
his terror campaign.
“He was a Donald Trump superfan,”
they wrote.
During the sentencing, however,
Judge Rakoff said Mr. Sayoc’s politics
were “something of a sideshow.” In-
stead, the judge said the design flaws in
the bombs — including timers that were
not set to go off and fuse wiring that was
inoperable — indicated that Mr. Sayoc
had only intended to scare his victims,
not harm them.
Before he was sentenced, Mr. Sayoc
read a handwritten statement, apologiz-
ing. “I wish more than anything I could
turn back time and take back what I did,”
he said. “But I want you to know, your
honor, with all my heart and soul, I feel
the pain and suffering of these victims.”
As the judge announced the sentence,
Mr. Sayoc broke into sobs, resting his
head in his hands clasped on the table
before him. Then he looked up at the ceil-
ing and mouthed, “Thank you.”
Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States
attorney in Manhattan, said after the
sentencing that although “thankfully no
one was hurt by his actions, Sayoc’s do-
mestic terrorism challenged our nation’s
cherished tradition of peaceful political
discourse.”
Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers, who are federal
public defenders, had no comment.
Mr. Sayoc’s terror campaign and the
frenzied investigation that followed
seized the nation for two weeks in Octo-
ber, just before the midterm elections. Af-
ter a four-day manhunt, Mr. Sayoc was
arrested outside an auto-parts store near
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he was liv-
ing in a decrepit white van that was plas-
tered with bombastic stickers that glori-fied Mr. Trump and placed Mr. Obama
and Mrs. Clinton in red cross-hairs.
Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers had urged Judge
Rakoff to impose a prison sentence of 10
years, which would have been the man-
datory minimum Mr. Sayoc faced, plus
one month.
At the time of his arrest, they said, Mr.
Sayoc was suffering from the untreated
mental illness, compounded by exces-
sive steroid use, and he had become in-
creasingly obsessive, isolated and para-
noid.“In this darkness,” the lawyers wrote
in a sentencing memo, “Mr. Sayoc found
light in Donald J. Trump.”
Mr. Sayoc listened to Mr. Trump’s self-
help books and championed him on so-
cial media. He watched Fox News reli-
giously while working out at the gym.
“Because of Mr. Sayoc’s mental ill-
ness, this type of rhetoric deeply af-
fected him because he so greatly ad-
mired the president,” one of Mr. Sayoc’s
lawyers, Ian Marcus Amelkin, said in
court. “It is impossible, I believe, to sepa-
rate the political climate and his mental
illness.”
Last fall, Mr. Sayoc’s lawyers wrote,
the “slow-boil of Mr. Sayoc’s political ob-
sessions and delusional beliefs” led him
to build and send his 16 packages to 13
intended victims he considered to be Mr.
Trump’s enemies. In Mr. Sayoc’s mind,
the devices were “designed to look like
pipe bombs,” his lawyers said, but they
were a hoax to scare his targets.
Each device consisted of plastic pipe
with a digital alarm clock and attached
wires. An F.B.I. explosives expert, Kevin
D. Finnerty, testified at the sentencing
the devices would not have functioned
as designed, but were capable of explod-
ing if mishandled.
Jane Kim, a prosecutor, said in court
that because of Mr. Sayoc’s attacks, hun-
dreds of law enforcement officers were
mobilized around the country, thou-
sands of postal employees were on alert
for suspicious packages, buildings and
mail facilities were evacuated and
schools were ordered to shelter in place.
“The defendant’s campaign of terror
was national in reach and extremely se-
rious,” she said.
She added that had Mr. Sayoc in-
tended the bombs to be hoaxes, he couldhave packed them with sand, but he
chose to use glass fragments.
Ms. Kim also addressed the defense’s
argument that shifted blame to Mr.
Trump. “With respect to some of the ex-
cuses that the defendant has advanced
about politics and politicians, the gov-
ernment would submit that politics can-
not justify a terrorist attack,” she said.
“Politics here cannot justify 16 bombs
being mailed.”
When Mr. Sayoc pleaded guilty in
court, he listed his intended victims. In
addition to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton,
they included former Vice President Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr.; Senator Kamala Har-
ris, a California Democrat; Senator Cory
Booker, a New Jersey Democrat;
George Soros, a billionaire Democratic
donor; and John O. Brennan, a former
C.I.A. director.
The list also included Representative
Maxine Waters, a California Democrat;
former Attorney General Eric H. Holder
Jr.; Tom Steyer, a prominent Democratic
donor; James R. Clapper Jr., a former di-
rector of national intelligence; the actor
Robert De Niro; and CNN.
Prosecutors had also said Represent-
ative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a
Florida Democrat, was a victim of Mr.
Sayoc’s campaign; he falsely listed her
as the return address on his packages.
After the sentencing, Ms. Wasserman
Schultz said in a statement that Mr.
Sayoc “was admittedly inspired by the
president’s hateful rhetoric.”
“This president’s words have conse-
quences,” she said.Man Who Sent Pipe Bombs to Trump Critics Is Sentenced to 20 Years
WPLG-TV, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSJudge Extends Leniency
To President’s ‘Superfan’
By BENJAMIN WEISER
and ALI WATKINSCesar Sayoc, above in custody in October 2018 and at left in a photo taken
from social media. Mr. Sayoc pleaded guilty in March to mailing 16 bombs to
targets including CNN, Hillary Clinton and the actor Robert De Niro.More New York news appears
on Page 20.TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019 A
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