More death on Long Island

Manny Fernandez has an article in The New York Times about another Long Island murder:

Every day in the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, convicted murderers are sentenced to hard time for taking the lives of people who never asked to die. In Room 1111 recently, Kenneth Minor (photo) got twenty years to life for killing a man who did.
Last month, after four hours of deliberation, a jury found Mr. Minor guilty of murder in the second degree, agreeing with prosecutors who argued that the homicide of Jeffrey Locker, 52, was not a mercy killing, but a murder for money.
Mr. Minor, 38, was on Second Avenue in East Harlem in July 2009 when Mr. Locker, a married father of three from Long Island, hired him to “do a Kevorkian”, Mr. Minor told the police. Mr. Locker was later found dead in his car, bound and stabbed.
Mr. Minor claimed that he had held a knife to Mr. Locker’s steering wheel while Mr. Locker, his hands tied behind his back, repeatedly thrust his chest into the blade. As bizarre and improbable as it sounded, elements of Mr. Minor’s confession turned out to be true: the prosecution and the defense agreed that Mr. Locker, a motivational speaker in financial trouble, had wanted to kill himself and make it look as if he had been murdered so that his family could collect on millions of dollars in insurance money.
Mr. Minor sat in an 11th-floor courtroom facing Justice Carol Berkman of State Supreme Court. Holding back tears, he offered his condolences to Mr. Locker’s family and asked the judge for leniency and forgiveness. Leaning into a microphone, he asked Justice Berkman for a sentence that would allow him to “try to make it home before I’m a senior citizen”, adding: “But I feel you already made your mind up a month ago anyway. In the end, a life is a life, and I ask forgiveness.”
Mr. Minor’s wife looked on near the back of the courtroom. None of Mr. Locker’s relatives attended the sentencing. They had submitted a brief statement to Justice Berkman in which they described Mr. Locker as a beloved husband, father, and son, but the statement was not read in court. Instead, Mr. Minor was the one who claimed to speak for him.
“Only two people in the world know what happened that night,” Mr. Minor said. “And one of them is not here no more. But he did not want this for me, for me to lose the rest of my life.” He added: “In the end, Mr. Locker is where he wanted to be. I can’t take that back now, but I’m no animal. And I ain’t got no malice in my heart.”
Murder in the second degree carries a minimum sentence of fifteen years to life and a maximum of 25 years to life. Justice Berkman told Mr. Minor in court that he had been “willing, for cash, to perform acts of extreme violence,” and she announced her sentence of twenty years to life. Mr. Minor yelled an expletive and was quickly escorted outside the courtroom by several court officers.
Mr. Minor’s wife declined to comment. Mr. Minor’s lawyer, Daniel Gotlin, said his client was appealing the conviction.
Jeffrey Locker, a motivational speaker, was killed in East Harlem in 2009.
Mr. Locker, who lived with his wife, daughter and two sons in Valley Stream in Nassau County, described himself on his Web site as a behavior modification expert. Shortly before his death, he was sued as an investor in a Ponzi scheme.
Evidence and testimony in the nearly three-week trial showed that Mr. Locker had been trying to end his life. One man, Melvin Fleming, testified for the prosecution that Mr. Locker had also approached him in East Harlem. Mr. Fleming said Mr. Locker had said he was hanging around East Harlem because he was “looking for someone to make him dead”.
Mr. Minor was caught on surveillance tape entering Mr. Locker’s car on the night of his death and using Mr. Locker’s ATM card the same evening. Mr. Minor told the police that the ATN card was the payment Mr. Locker had given him for assisting in his suicide.
Mr. Locker had taken out life insurance policies worth nearly $18 million in the months before his death. Mr. Minor’s lawyer said testimony in the trial revealed that Mr. Locker’s family had so far collected $6 million. Principal Life Insurance Company has refused to pay a $4 million death-benefit claim, saying in a lawsuit filed last year in federal court in Brooklyn that Mr. Locker lied about his income when he filled out the paperwork. Irving Serota, a lawyer and the father of Mr. Locker’s wife, Lois, said the Locker family had no comment.

Rico says that, given his fetish with the number, that's pretty scary, Room 1111...