One would prevent the other

Jo Craven McGinty has an article in The New York Times about gub ownership in New York City, at least by famous (and rich) people:

Men and women. Democrats and Republicans. Doctors, lawyers, merchants, and moguls. A remarkable, if relatively small, cross-section of New Yorkers legally own handguns, according to public records obtained by The New York Times.
Among the more than 37,000 people licensed to have a handgun in the city are dozens of boldface names and public figures: prominent business leaders, elected officials, celebrities, journalists, judges, and lawyers.
Some expressed pride in their gun ownership, like the renowned divorce lawyer Raoul Felder, who readily posed with his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson. Others, including David Breitbart, Yetta Kurland, and Walter Mack, all well-known lawyers, were irked to learn they would be included in an article based on the public records. And there were a few conflicted souls, like Alexis Stewart, co-host of Whatever With Alexis and Jennifer on SiriusXM radio and the Hallmark Channel. “I don’t believe people should be allowed to have guns in America,” Ms. Stewart, daughter of Martha, said in an interview, explaining that she bought a .357 Magnum after 9/11, but would be happy to give it up if handguns were banned. “Having a swimming pool is way more dangerous than having a gun,” she added.
Getting a handgun legally in New York is a two-step process. First, applicants must obtain a license, which costs $340, takes about twelve weeks to process, is good for three years, and requires a background check by the New York Police Department. In addition, fingerprinting costs about $100.
Those who pass that hurdle then must get a purchase authorization from the police for the particular weapon they intend to buy. One handgun license may list up to 25 weapons (so far, no one has tried to register more than that, officials said), but buyers must wait ninety days between purchases.
The 41,164 handguns registered with the Police Department as of 14 January include those owned by more than 2,400 people who live outside the city but have permission to bring their weapons here: people like Roger E. Ailes, the president of Fox News, whose license lists an address in New Jersey; John J. Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, who lives in Westchester County; and Sean Hannity, the conservative talk-show host, who lives on Long Island.
There are eight kinds of handgun licenses in New York, one of which is for dealers. The most common restricts the weapon to the owner’s home, but others allow license holders, including security guards, gun custodians, and people who demonstrate a need for protection, to carry weapons with them.
Nearly 4,000 license holders— those who have a “carry business”, “limited carry”, or “special carry” license— can legally conceal their weapons. The Times obtained the database of handgun owners from the Police Department after filing a Public Records Act request and a lawsuit; the police released ZIP codes, but omitted street addresses. The database also did not include the 14,602 retired police officers who are licensed to have weapons.
The Police Department issues a separate license for long guns: about 52,000 shotguns and rifles are registered, but the owners’ names and addresses are not public record.
There are no comprehensive statistics available on gun ownership nationally, because most states do not require licenses or permits. But an annual survey by the Pew Research Center suggests that about one-third of the nation’s homes have a gun. In comparison, at most, about one percent of New York City’s households have a licensed gun. (It’s impossible to know how many illegal guns are circulating in the city, but in 2010, the Police Department seized 5,318, including 2,984 pistols, 1,402 revolvers, 403 rifles, and 349 shotguns.)
At Westside Pistol and Rifle Range, in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, the owner, Darren Leung, said that there was a surge of new members after 9/11, but that the number had since fallen slightly, to 1,500. About twenty or thirty members a day come by to take classes or to practice with paper targets in one of sixteen enclosed fifty-foot stalls. On the sidewalk outside on West 20th Street, the sound of gunshots from the basement range is not audible.
“In a weird way, it’s a kind of stress reliever,” said William Rosado, an illustrator who regularly visits the range to fire his nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson. “It’s something completely different than what I do for a living.”
Most gun owners interviewed said they had never drawn their weapons in self-defense. But John A. Catsimatidis, the owner of the Red Apple Group and Gristedes supermarket chain, recalled a chilling episode from the mid-1980s, when he intercepted a robber fleeing one of his stores in the Bronx. “The first guy comes out with a sawed-off shotgun, goes right by me and says, ‘Be cool, man,’” said Mr. Catsimatidis, who has owned a gun for at least 35 years. “The second guy comes out with a sawed-off shotgun, goes by me and says, ‘Be cool, man.’ The third guy comes out with a sawed-off shotgun, and I intertwine my arm into his arm, and I put my gun to his head, and I say, ‘Drop your gun, or I’ll blow your head off.’” When the police arrived, they arrested the man, and examined Mr. Catsimatidis’s weapon, a Walther PPK/S nine millimeter pistol. “The sergeant says to me, ‘You couldn’t have shot the guy anyway: your safety is still on,’” Mr. Catsimatidis recalled. “The sweat started dripping off my head. I’m not going to do anything stupid like that again.”

Rico says a handgun might have prevented this, as described in an article by Alan Feuer in The New York Times, however:

The seventeen-second video, assembled from security cameras in Harlem, showed what seemed to be an ordinary man, in a cap and a leather jacket, walking down the street with an ordinary suitcase. Neither, however, was ordinary, the authorities said. The man, they claimed, was a murderer; the suitcase held the body of a woman he had killed.
It was one of those uniquely gruesome crimes that seemed devised expressly for the tabloids, and the expected headlines (Body-Dump Fiend! and Horror in Harlem!) quickly appeared. The articles beneath them dwelt on grisly details— a presumed sexual encounter, a frying pan, an electrical cord— and on the sordidness of the characters: Betty Williams, 28, a strung-out prostitute who had been to Rikers Island several times, and Hassan Malik, 55, a Navy veteran with a long criminal history of his own.
Then, within days, the whole thing disappeared from public view, chalked up, if to anything at all, to a streetwalker’s fate, or to a criminal’s devolution or to mere bad luck. Questions lingered: How had these two met? Why had things turned violent? And, most important, how, in 21st-century New York, was it possible for a strangled woman to be stuffed inside a suitcase and summarily deposited on the street?
Perhaps that last question is unanswerable, but there are subtle clues in the public record that indicate that Mr. Malik— who contacted the police on Christmas Day, three days after the suitcase was found— was a violent drifter with a history of beating up women. Dark hints also emerged, in extensive interviews with Ms. Williams’s family, of her past as the daughter of drug addicts, as a young woman who had been married to an addict, and as a mother who had abandoned her only child at birth. These details, these characters, were in some sense even more troubling than the original portraits.
At Ms. Williams’s funeral, on 6 January in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a chaplain, Robert D. Rice, posed the common questions: “When death is sudden and unexpected, the question most of the time is, ‘Why?’ ” he said. “ ‘Why this?’ This question is most often asked, and most often left unanswered, when sudden death occurs. ‘Why?’”
On 10 March 2001, a young couple were married at City Hall. The bride, Ms. Williams, was nineteen at the time, and wore for the occasion a rhinestone tiara, a pale yellow dress, and matching high heels. The groom, Eduardo Rodriguez, was a thirty-year-old Dominican of dapper style but limited means.
The wedding was a modest one, attended only by the couple, the bride’s paternal aunt, and the aunt’s three children, two of whom were flower girls. After the ceremony, there was lunch at TGI Fridays on 34th Street, near Pennsylvania Station.
“Everyone was looking at her,” the aunt, Carmen Perez, proudly recalled. Ms. Perez had made the tiara. She had also made the bride’s corsage and had decorated a special wedding glass, which was put to use later for champagne toasts.
The bride’s mother, Lorez Williams, did not attend. She was in prison again, serving a drug sentence of two and a half years at Albion Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The bride’s father, Rafael Perez, was not there, either. This was not unusual for Mr. Perez, who was described by his eldest daughter, Yajaira Springer, as “a guy who was almost a baseball player but got caught up in that Washington Heights-era drug thing.”
When lunch was over, everyone returned to Carmen Perez’s house in the Bronx, which was like a second home to Ms. Williams. She had been raised in New York and in the Dominican Republic by her aunt. Her own home was troubled, to say the least. Before Betty was born, her sister Yajaira, then an infant, had been placed in foster care after a fire broke out while she was home alone. (Ms. Springer said her mother had been out buying drugs.) Fearful of something similar happening to Betty, Ms. Perez arranged for her to move, at the age of eighteen months, to Santo Domingo, where she lived with her father’s family for about a decade. “We didn’t want her to be lost,” Ms. Perez said.
Even as a child, Ms. Williams was headstrong and spontaneous and enjoyed life’s luxuries; she was partial to Chanel, designer jeans, and $100 sneakers, her family said. She concluded early on that life in the Dominican Republic was not for her. Though her English was poor, she wanted to return to New York and “her original roots”, her sister said. Her father’s family reluctantly conceded. “I know now, if they could take that back,” Ms. Springer said, “they would.”
Ms. Williams went to junior high school and then John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx, but she did not do well. “People used to make fun of her,” said Josephine Banguela, a cousin. “She didn’t get math and didn’t speak English well.”
Betty quit school at 18; no one tried to stop her. “When she saw that freedom,” said Norma Fuentes, an old family friend, “she just ran wild.”
Falling back in with her mother, Ms. Williams also fell into drugs, her sister said.
“She used to make Betty knock on drug dealers’ doors and flirt with them, and then my mother would rob the dealers,” Ms. Springer said. “Betty had a shape on her and my mother sent her all over the Bronx; it was a sad thing.” Their father sometimes took part in the robberies, too, Ms. Springer said; the three of them smoked crack together. (Mr. Perez, who lives in the Bronx, could not be reached for comment. His family said he frequently changed his phone number.)
It was around this time, in early 2000, that Ms. Williams met her future husband at a nightclub in Harlem. “She loved to dance,” said her cousin, Ms. Banguela, and Mr. Rodriguez— fit, clean, sharply dressed— was a dancer. He was also an illegal immigrant, Ms. Springer said; they married, in part, so he could remain in the United States.
They found an apartment in Upper Manhattan, and Ms. Williams seemed happy for a while, her family said. But within nine months, it became apparent that Mr. Rodriguez, who had no visible income, was addicted to drugs. He wasted money and stopped paying rent. One night, Ms. Perez recalled, Ms. Williams hit him with a broomstick for smoking crack in their bathroom. She was “against drugs”, Ms. Perez said, but Mr. Rodriguez encouraged her to smoke crack with him. As Ms. Springer put it, “Her husband had her strung out full time.”
A year after taking the apartment, they were thrown out and landed at a homeless shelter near Central Park. It was there, in 2005, that Ms. Williams learned she was pregnant. The same year, her husband was arrested on a drug charge and was deported to the Dominican Republic. Growing distant, Ms. Williams stopped visiting the family, Ms. Perez said.
Eduardo Jr. was born at Harlem Hospital in 2006; the child was fine, but Ms. Williams suffered seizures during the delivery. She was unconscious for nearly a week, and when she awoke, the city had taken custody of the baby. Her aunt said Ms. Williams tried to get the baby back, then quit. Her sister’s story was harsher. “She just walked out and left him there,” Ms. Springer said. “It comes from lack of love.”
Late one night in 1992— when Betty Williams was ten— the police responded to a “domestic” at the Valley Oaks apartments in Atlanta. Hassan Malik, 37, lived in Unit A with his girlfriend, Sherri Tutt. The officers took Mr. Malik into custody. Five months later, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to two days in jail. His case file carried a warning: “No violent contact with Sherri Tutt.”
Born on Long Island, Mr. Malik was one of nine children— five boys and four girls— with the same father, but different mothers. His name then, throughout Roosevelt High School and a brief stint in the Navy, was Gregory Murray. It is unclear when and why he changed it.
His military career was undistinguished: he served from February of 1973 to April of 1974, mainly on the aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, where, as an apprentice, he worked maintaining aircraft and was trained, federal records show, for “race relations” and “oxygen canister disposal”. After his discharge, he went to college at North Carolina State University and obtained a degree from the now-defunct and unaccredited Atlanta School of Law.
Mr. Malik has pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree murder, saying he acted in self-defense. He declined, from his cell on Rikers Island, to be interviewed, as did several family members. Ms. Tutt’s mother, Brenda Moore, said only that she felt badly for Mr. Malik, who had given her a grandchild. The altercation with Ms. Tutt was neither the first nor the last time Mr. Malik had trouble with the law. In 1988, he was arrested on a charge of credit card fraud; in 1994, he was convicted of forgery. Before he served his two-year term in federal prison for the forgery, Mr. Malik separated from his wife; defaulted on a $15,000 student loan; was arrested several times on charges of passing bad checks (one resulting in a lawsuit against him by the E-Z Check Cashing Corporation of Atlanta); and was sued by a towing company that said he had abandoned his car on the street. After he got out of prison, in 1997, he was arrested within months, this time in the Bronx, and pleaded guilty to assaulting a former girlfriend, Semeera Estelle. Before a sentence was rendered, he was charged again: with harassing Ms. Estelle at her job at a school in Westchester County. After she refused to drive him to a bank to cash his paycheck, according to police reports, he stalked her at work and later called her and said: “You’re messing with my life. I’m going to kill you.”
In a statement, Ms. Estelle told the police, “I am fearful of my life.” Mr. Malik pleaded guilty to aggravated harassment and was sentenced to time served.
Five years later, court papers show, he attacked another girlfriend, Phyllis Runyon, at their apartment in Tacoma, Washington. In May of 2002, she had thrown him out. Five weeks later, he returned with a spare key, “but the door was blocked with a chair”. Ms. Runyon wrote in her request for an order of protection. “He then proceeded to push through the chair, breaking the door off the panel, came in, and attacked me using a dinette chair.” She was hospitalized. Asked if drugs were involved in the attack, she wrote: “crack/cocaine”.
At that point, Mr. Malik was 47 and without a permanent home. Real estate records show a pattern of itinerancy: an apartment in Tallahassee, Florida; a house in Durham, North Carolina; the Valley Oaks apartments in Atlanta. Georgia; a veterans’ hospital in Virginia; addresses in Washington, Philadelphia, Westchester, Manhattan, and the Bronx.
Tanya Murray, a niece in Georgia, said in a brief interview that her side of the family had not spoken with Mr. Malik in years. When told he had been charged with murder, she sighed. “It is what it is,” Ms. Murray said.
After Ms. Williams abandoned her child, she descended into crime. In 2006, she was jailed twice for criminal possession of a controlled substance. In 2007, she was jailed three times, for drug charges and criminal trespass. In 2008, seven times. She went to jail once in 2009 and, last year, served a final sentence for theft of services in the Bronx.
“The last time I spoke to her, a year ago, she called from Rikers Island,” Ms. Banguela said. “She said: ‘I’m so fat. I want to come back to the family. I want to change.’ ” Instead, Ms. Williams moved back in with her mother, in the Bronx, and spent days getting high and watching action programs on television. “She was on the crack,” her mother, Lorez Williams, said. “She resembled me when I used to be young.”
Last spring, the younger woman found a new apartment, on East 111th Street. It was around the corner from an hourly rate hotel, the New Ebony, which offers condoms to its patrons from a glass bowl at the reception desk. On the streets, she called herself Jackie.
People in the neighborhood recalled her wandering around, stoned, and taking men to the hotel. “The day before she got herself killed,” said Miguel Gandarilla, who works at a deli across the street from the hotel, “I told Jackie: ‘Take it easy. You better calm down.’ She said, ‘Shut up.’”
Yajaira Springer’s foster sister, Jaqueline, lived not far from the New Ebony. She had met Ms. Williams a few times, and though they were not related, considered her a sister. She remembers seeing a woman in her neighborhood, a sad creature, clearly hooked on drugs and often in the company of shady-looking men. “I seen her,” Jaqueline Springer said, “but I didn’t know who she was.”
When the video clip of the man and the suitcase was released, word went around the neighborhood that the woman stuffed inside was Jackie. Soon, the family discovered that Jackie was, in fact, Betty Williams. “She was right down the street,” Jaqueline Springer said, weeping at the funeral. “Right down the street, and I never even knew.”
AT 2:18 p.m. on Christmas Day, a man called the 23rd Precinct station house in Harlem. “I’m the one dragging the bag,” he said. “I’m scared. I’m not trying to run from you guys. I promise I’ll call back.” Eight hours later, he did, telling a detective: “I’m still in the city. My name is Malik and I need help.” He was arrested two days later in Tarrytown, New York. While being driven to the station house in Harlem, he told his captors he had a master’s degree and then, according to court records, asked, cryptically, “What’s the difference between manslaughter and murder?” Within two hours, he had confessed to killing Betty Williams.
On 18 December, he said, a friend introduced him to a woman named Jackie at his apartment, which was a few blocks from the New Ebony Hotel. Mr. Malik said Jackie had asked if, on occasion, she could bring men to the apartment for sex. “I said it would be all right,” Mr. Malik wrote in a confession, “but I would have to get paid.” They agreed on a price: $35 an hour.
At 2 a.m. on 21 December, Jackie showed up at the apartment with a drug dealer named Eric, according to the confession. Eric sold her crack then left, Mr. Malik said, and Jackie went to the living room, apparently to get high. Mr. Malik took a Seroquel — a drug sold on the street as a sedative — then fell asleep, he said, in the bedroom.
“Next thing I know, it’s morning and Jackie is hitting me with the bottom of a large metal cast-iron frying pan,” he wrote. He said she was screaming, “Where’s the money at?” and threatened to have him killed. There was a struggle. Mr. Malik, 6-foot-1 and 195 pounds, got hold of the pan. He clubbed Ms. Williams twice in the head, he wrote, but she continued fighting. She grabbed the cord to his VCR, he said, and wound it around his neck. But again he disarmed her and choked her with the cord, he said, until she lay, not moving, on the floor.
“I assumed she was dead,” he wrote, “so I closed the door and called my friend Richard Martin.” Mr. Martin turned up 20 minutes later and, upon seeing the body, went back out for supplies: gloves, bleach, ammonia, garbage bags and a large black suitcase, Mr. Malik said. “I put Jackie’s body in the suitcase,” he wrote. “I put her in a garbage bag from the waist up so that blood didn’t leak through the suitcase.”
He waited until 11:30 p.m., then wheeled the suitcase out of his building, up First Avenue, and down 114th Street. “I was sweating a lot and my hip was hurting, so I stopped by a stoop in the middle of the block,” he wrote. “Finally, I decided to leave the suitcase by some garbage cans, under a scaffold.”
A few minutes later, a homeless man rooting through the cans opened the suitcase and a leg popped out. He called the police.