Murder of Romona Moore

rdf:langString Murder of Romona Moore

rdf:langString Romona Moore (October 8, 1981 – c. April 27, 2003) was a 21-year-old Hunter College honors student who disappeared April 24, 2003, in Brooklyn, New York. Two months later, her body was discovered outside an abandoned house which an anonymous caller had directed her mother to. Two male suspects were arrested; they were convicted in 2006 of having kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered Moore. The young immigrant from Guyana had been living at home with her parents and relatives before she was kidnapped. The two men were sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder and other charges related to Moore, with an additional 22 years for their escape attempt in January 2006 during the trial. In a separate trial during this period, the two suspects were also convicted of having abducted and raped a 15-year-old girl in 2003 soon after Moore's murder. The girl had escaped from them and gone to police. Her report contributed to their apprehension in the Moore case. In 2008, Moore's mother Ellie Carmichael filed a suit in federal district court against the New York Police Department (NYPD), charging its officials with racial bias in how they handled cases of missing persons; the suit was accepted for trial. Carmichael contrasted the NYPD's treatment of her daughter's case with that of Imette St. Guillen, a white graduate student from the Upper West Side who disappeared around the same time (having fallen victim to a similar crime, St. Guillen was found raped, tortured and murdered shortly after her disappearance was reported). In August 2014, the federal judge dismissed the case, saying there was no evidence of systemic racial bias within the department on this issue.