Killing of Student Hits Close to Home for New Yorkers

It has been nearly two weeks since Imette St. Guillen’s body was found along a desolate roadside in Brooklyn, and many New Yorkers can recite from memory the shreds of evidence in the case: the hotel-grade floral quilt wrapped around her, the cat hairs adhering to it, the tube sock stuffed in her mouth.

Those who have followed news coverage of her slaying speculate about what happened around 3:30 a.m. that Saturday, when St. Guillen, a 24-year-old graduate student studying criminal justice, decided to keep drinking alone at a bar after her girlfriend headed home. Or what happened a half-hour later at closing time, when St. Guillen, apparently intoxicated, was the last patron at The Falls.

On Wednesday, investigators continued to focus on Darryl Littlejohn, 41, a bouncer with a history of felony convictions. Earlier in the week, authorities removed items -- including seats from a van -- from Littlejohn’s home in Queens and searched a gray van found nearby.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly did not call Littlejohn a suspect. “He’s clearly a person of interest in this case,” Kelly said in an interview with NY1, a cable news channel. “We are waiting for lab results.”

The bouncer is being held on charges of violating parole, but has not been charged in St. Guillen’s death.

In New York, recently lauded by the FBI as the “safest big city in America,” the grad student’s slaying has gotten under people’s skin.

Charly Wilder, a bartender at Gatsby’s, near where St. Guillen was last seen alive, said she listened in on one group of young people the following Saturday night and realized that they were tracing the victim’s steps through SoHo.

“I don’t remember the last time a crime hit this close to home,” said Wilder, 23. “People don’t think of this as a dangerous neighborhood, and they think of crime as more of an ‘80s thing.”

St. Guillen went out drinking that evening in a neighborhood that has left behind its skid-row image: These days, Bowery bars are flanked by boutiques selling French bath salts and gourmet cheesecake.

As closing time approached at the Pioneer Bar, according to investigators, the friend who was with St. Guillen -- a schoolteacher and high school classmate -- decided to head home. St. Guillen stayed. A little while later, the friend called to make sure St. Guillen was all right. She said she was.

The following evening, an anonymous 911 call led police to her body. It was under a streetlight in a bleak section of Brooklyn, naked and wrapped in a quilt. She had been raped and asphyxiated, her hands bound, a sock stuffed in her mouth and tape stripped over her face, according to news reports.

The investigation increasingly has focused on events that occurred at The Falls around 4 a.m., after staff members locked the doors and pulled down a metal grating.

For the first several days after the slaying, bartender Dan Dorrian told police that St. Guillen had left the bar alone.

But late last week, according to news reports, Dorrian offered a different account: that St. Guillen would not leave the bar and he had asked Littlejohn to remove her.

The bouncer, it turned out, had been convicted of armed robbery and drug possession -- he has never been accused of a sex crime -- under a series of colorful pseudonyms: “Jonathan Blaze,” also the alter-ego of the comic book character Ghost Rider; “Darryl Banks,” a comic book artist who inked the Green Lantern; “John Handsome,” possibly a reference to “Handsome John” Riley, a detective in the Green Lantern series.

Littlejohn told the New York Daily News he was not involved in the St. Guillen slaying.

Uptown, at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice where St. Guillen was finishing her master’s degree, the case has crept into the curriculum. Lawrence Kobilinsky, a professor of forensic science, spent much of one recent class using the case as an illustration.

Even in crimes that hit painfully close to home, “you push all those feelings aside and have hard evidence. Right now, the loop has to be closed,” he said. “There’s no arrest because they haven’t closed the loop.”

In interviews, several John Jay students criticized news coverage of the case, saying it should not overshadow chronic violence that occurs in New York neighborhoods.

Many, though, have penned raw entries in a condolence book; one wrote, “Imette -- I can’t even tell you how many times I have been drunk like this. You are a beautiful and innocent person.”

Those final moments of the night trouble Eileen Avezzano, whose shop, Eileen’s Cheesecake, is opposite the bar where St. Guillen was last seen.

“As a mother who has daughters, what’s the basic thing you learn in Girl Scouts?” she said. “There’s safety in numbers.”

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Times staff writer Elizabeth Mehren in Boston contributed to this report.