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Man who jumped out of freezer at Manhattan restaurant and attacked staff was charged with double murder in Boston

A man who died after launching a bizarre attack at a popular Upper West Side eatery yesterday was released on personal recognizance the month before in Boston after a judge dismissed the key piece of evidence against him in a 1988 Roxbury double murder.

The New York Post reports that Carlton Henderson, 54, jumped out of a walk-in freezer at Sarabeth's at West 80th Street and Amsterdam Avenue around 11 a.m., screamed at workers about Satan and picked up a knife and began chasing them - until he collapsed. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Henderson was arraigned in Roxbury Municipal Court in May, 2017 on charges he fatally shot William Medina and Antonio Dos Reis on Windsor Street in Roxbury on May 7, 1988.

As is customary in murder charges, a judge ordered him held without bail.

But on July 26 of this year, Suffolk Superior Court Judge Janet Sanders said prosecutors could not use a 1993 statement Henderson gave implicating himself in planning the murders, which she said was the main piece of evidence against him. Because Suffolk County prosecutors no longer had much of a case against him, she freed him on personal recognizance.

At issue was the way Henderson confessed to the murder: Under a "proffer" agreement with federal prosecutors investigating a San Diego-based drug ring. Under such agreements, prosecutors normally agree not to use anything a defendant might say during initial conversations so that he can speak more freely.

In her summary of the case, Sanders wrote that Henderson, sentenced to 15 1/2 years on a federal drug conviction in Louisiana in 1992, called his lawyer in the case the next year and offered to spill the beans on a San Diego drug operation, and that he could provide details of a 1988 double murder in Boston related to it.

The FBI agreed to talk to him, had him transferred to a prison near San Diego and offered him a "proffer" agreement. It was in one of the conversations under this agreement - which included two Boston Police detectives - that he claimed to have had something to do with the two murders.

But, as Sanders continued, the alleged drug lord was shot to death by Los Angeles police and one of the two brothers who allegedly directly carried out the Roxbury murders was also killed, in Miami. Henderson's information never went anywhere and he served out his time, and everybody involved with the case gradually forgot about it. Except, of course, for the two men's families.

Sanders continued that in 2014, at a cookout Boston Police held for homicide victims, Medina's sister - herself a BPD homicide detective - approached Det. John Cronin of the BPD cold-case unit to ask for help in finding her brother's killer.

Cronin and another homicide detective learned of the Henderson interview and tracked him down to his home near Phoenix, as well as one of the federal prosecutors and Henderson's attorney. Henderson wouldn't talk, but the attorneys mentioned the "proffer" agreement.

Henderson's current Boston attorney, John Amabile used their recollections - no written document could be found - that such an agreement existed when Henderson spoke in 1993.

Assistant Suffolk County DA John Verner, however, argued that without written proof of an agreement, Henderson had no legal proof he had a proffer deal - especially since in his first interview on the current case, Henderson's Louisiana attorney, Merle Schneiderwind, said there was no written proffer agreement.

"The defendant must prove beyond a preponderance of the evidence that such agreement existed," he wrote in a memorandum. "In this case the defendant has not met his burden of proving the existence of a proffer agreement." He added:

In Detective Ruiz's numerous years as a detective, including ten in the homicide unit, if a proffer agreement is entered into, a copy of the agreement is given to the Boston Police for their file Ruiz thoroughly reviewed the file and determined that there was no written proffer agreement or any evidence of any agreement, written or otherwise, in the file. In addition, during his pre- indictment investigation, he turned up no evidence of there being a written proffer agreement in place.

Detective Ruiz interviewed Attorney Merle Schneiderwind on May 18, 2017. In that interview, Attorney Schneiderwind told Detective Ruiz that, with regard to the Boston Police interview with Carlton Henderson, "it was a sit-down for information and there was not [a] written proffer agreement." That interview was one year before Attorney Schneiderwind testified in this matter and four months before he signed the affidavit submitted to the Court in this matter. It was also one year before Attorney Schneiderwind told anyone from the government that he drew a distinction between a written proffer and a written proffer agreement.

But Sanders concluded that she is not surprised evidence related to a 1993 interview might go missing - Schneiderwind later said he routinely destroyed inactive files after 15 years and that he never would have let a client talk to the feds without a profer agreement:

In the instant case, the Court concludes that the defendant has met his burden of proving that the defendant and federal prosecutors entered into a proffer agreement sometime in early summer 1993, before the defendant was interviewed by [B{D homicide] detectives Horsley and Traylor. A term of that agreement was that no statement made by him in a proffer session would be used against him, except to impeach him as a witness at trial. This Court further concludes that because Horsley and Traylor conducted the interview only as a result of being introduced to the defendant by Kelly, a federal prosecutor, the proffer agreement applied to the statements the defendant gave to Boston police on July 27, 1993. Although the crime of murder would be prosecuted in state court, the 1988 double homicide had a federal dimension to it because of its connection to a national drug ring. The proffer agreement issued by the federal authorities thus applied equally to statements given to state authorities acting together with federal prosecutors as part of what was at that point a federal investigation.

In a statement today, the DA's office added it had more evidence than just the statement:

More recently, investigators obtained a firearm that had been recovered from the Florida home of one of those alleged participants, now deceased, and test-fired it. Those tests yielded a ballistic match that corroborated Henderson’s earlier statements and he was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder last year.

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