Tessa Majors Killing: 14-Year-Old Boy Charged With Murder - The New York Times

A 14-year-old boy has been charged with murder in the killing of Tessa Majors, a Barnard College student, during a park robbery near her school in December.

The boy was charged with two counts of second-degree murder and several counts of robbery. The authorities said he would be tried as an adult.

Investigators had long believed that the teenager wielded the knife that killed Ms. Majors after she bit the hand of one of her three attackers during a violent struggle. Ms. Majors, 18, was found severely wounded on steps outside Morningside Park the night of Dec. 11.

The arrest brought a sense of relief to the authorities, who were under pressure to solve the first high-profile case under the new police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea.

“Sadly, it cannot bring back this young woman, this student, this victim,” Commissioner Shea said at a news conference on Saturday. “We can say we are confident that we have the person in custody who stabbed her.”

The commissioner, who stood beside the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said the 14-year-old boy was arrested at 10:30 p.m. Friday in the lobby of a building in the presence of his mother and other relatives without incident.

The authorities said investigators had collected several pieces of physical evidence, including blood samples and a cellphone; they also accumulated video evidence, witness identification and the suspect’s own statements that they said tied the 14-year-old to the crime scene.

Investigators had been on the teenager’s trail for weeks. Nine days after Ms. Majors’s death, the police took an unusual step of releasing images of the 14-year-old, asking the public to turn him in.

Then, in late December, the police tracked the 14-year-old to a family member’s home in the Bronx.

The authorities believed that the teenager’s family was shielding him until a mark on his hand healed, an official briefed on the case said. The official described the mark as consistent with a bite.

But just hours after he was questioned by the police, the teenager walked out of a police station house. Still, investigators were banking that DNA tests ordered by a Manhattan judge would connect the teenager and two others to the murder.

Mr. Vance said the evidence indicated that Ms. Majors had suffered a cruel death.

“It paints a gruesome picture of what this young woman endured in her final moments,” Mr. Vance said. “Some of the last words she was known to have said is, ‘Help me, I’m being robbed.’”

Ms. Majors, who had moved to New York from Virginia to attend the college, which is affiliated with Columbia University, was walking in Morningside Park when at least three teenagers tried to rob her, the police said.

A struggle ensued and one of her assailants stabbed her. As the three teenagers fled, Ms. Majors staggered up a flight of stairs, out of the park and onto the street and collapsed near West 116th Street and Morningside Drive. A campus security guard later found her bleeding to death.

The day after the murder, the police detained a 13-year-old who implicated himself and two 14-year-old middle school classmates in the attack.

Investigators tried to interview one of the 14-year-olds but the 13-year-old, who is not believed to be the one who delivered the fatal wounds to Ms. Majors, was released after he requested a lawyer and stopped cooperating.

The revelations of the teenagers’ ages rattled a city that has grown accustomed to low violent crime rates.

The case also echoed the notorious 1989 April attack on a jogger in Central Park. Three decades ago, investigators and prosecutors relied on tough interrogation techniques to obtain confessions from five teenagers accused of the brutal assault and rape of the jogger. The confessions were later proven to be false.

In the shadow of the Central Park case, police officials said they have taken extra steps to make sure a guardian or a lawyer was present each time one of the teenagers was questioned by detectives.

But lawyers with the Legal Aid Society, which represented the 13-year-old, have argued in court hearings that their client was subjected to aggressive interrogation tactics, including browbeating and screaming. The 13-year-old is expected to face trial for his role in the murder in family court in March.

Commissioner Shea said that the police were “in touch with Tessa Majors’s family” after the recent arrest.

“And again, sadly, there is no comfort that we can give them,” he said. “And for that, we are sorry.”

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

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