The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [27]
DAN P. LEE writes about crime, science, and politics for Philadelphia magazine. Another of his stories—about two dueling forensic pathologists—appeared in Best American Crime Reporting 2007. He lives in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood.
Coda
After pleading guilty to the thousands of charges against him, Michael Mastromarino was sentenced to twenty-five to fifty-eight years in Philadelphia and eighteen to fifty-four years in New York; the sentences are to be served concurrently, and he won’t be eligible for parole for at least eighteen years. Appearing in a Philadelphia courtroom, Mastromarino looked gaunt, his hair recently shaved. He apologized to his victims, saying, “I have many years to think about the wrongs I have committed, in prison.”
Louis Garzone and his brother Gerald also pleaded guilty, on the day their criminal trial was to commence; each was sentenced to nine and a half to twenty years in state prison, of which they are expected to serve at least eight. Their pleas were in large part the result of Mastromarino’s cooperation with Philadelphia authorities, as well as that of codefendant James McCafferty Jr. McCafferty, Jr. McCafferty, who claimed to have suffered from severe alcoholism, received a shorter sentence—three and a half to ten years in state prison—in exchange for agreeing to testify against the Garzone brothers and because he played a significantly smaller role in the criminal enterprise; he could be eligible for parole in as little as two years and eleven months.
The scene was emotional as the Garzones offered their pleas. About fifty people—some furious, others sobbing—packed the courtroom. Among them was Elizabeth Sparagno, who’d hired Louis Garzone to cremate her eighty-four-year-old mother Marie Lindgren’s body; Lindgren had been savagely murdered by two teenage neighbors to whom she’d once fed homemade cookies. Sparagno told the Philadelphia Inquirer she remained tortured by the double indignity. “It’s just not right,” she said. “Those boys already cut her head off, her pinky finger. And then later I find out that Garzone took her to the funeral home for those cutters who came down from New York.”
The civil trial against all the defendants is still pending.
Mark Boal
EVERYONE WILL REMEMBER ME AS SOME SORT OF MONSTER
FROM Rolling Stone
ON AN OVERCAST WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON last December, a skinny white teenager shuffled into the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, with an assault rifle hidden under his black hoodie. A cheery holiday atmosphere filled the aisles. Christmas trees twinkled, holiday music played softly. Nobody paid attention to the slouching teen as he got on the elevator in the Von Maur department store and rode it to Level 3.
He came out with his gun raised: an effeminate-looking, almost pretty boy with alabaster skin and cherry-red lips, holding the rifle like a pro—stock to cheek, elbow high. Harry Potter with an AK-47. He crossed the hall to the GIRLS 7–16 section, where, among the rows of dresses and frilly tops, he came across two women and shot and killed them both.
The high-decibel blasts ricocheted through the store and sent the remaining shoppers into a panicky, screaming dash for cover, and as they ran, crying out in confusion, the teen squeezed off two more rounds hitting the arm of a man lunging into a side door—then aiming at a man fleeing down an escalator, killing him before he reached the last step. The boy leaned over a balcony overlooking a central atrium, squinted down 40 feet to Level 1, where a janitor was scrambling to find a safe zone, and shot and killed him. Swiveling back to Level 3, he saw a woman ducking into an employee locker room, and he shot and killed her.
In the midst of the carnage, the boy changed magazines,