Flash! Armanious Case Broken!

This article is from New York Newsday. Remember that rash of ATM withdrawals, and the ATM surveillance tape with good pictures of the car? That was the first real break in the case, and it came when authorities got a court order to search Hossam Armanious' financial records. Three thousand dollars of ATM withdrawals made after the Armaniouses were dead tipped them off, and prompted them to look for those surveillance tapes. And now two men--one of whom was the Armaniouses' upstairs neighbor and tenant--are under arrest and charged with four counts of felony murder. The names of the suspects are Edward McDonald and Hamilton Sanchez. Neither name is Arabic, and both men were on federal parole for prior drug-offense convictions.

After months of criticizing the authorities for faulty enemy identification, I must now criticize them for the opposite problem: failure to check out those closest to the victims. The police really have egg on their faces now, not because this was a terrorist plot (it wasn't, after all), but because they did not follow the most elementary police procedure. To paraphrase the pulp author Sidney Sheldon: when anyone falls to an act of murder, and you're assigned to investigate, the first thing you do--the very first thing you do, the simple, obvious, you-don't-have-to-write-it-on-the-blackboard thing you do, is to check out all of the near acquaintances of the victim. Nothing can be more elementary than that. Yet these authorities never once asked themselves whether someone living directly upstairs from the victim might have known that he had recently come into a pile of money and would therefore have a motive for robbery.

The story we now hear about these tragic deaths is this: The two robbers, both masked, gained entry into the house under false pretenses of friendship (after all, the guy was the upstairs neighbor, which explains why the cops found no signs of forced entry) and bound and gagged the mother and the two daughters. They then waited for Hossam to come home from work and then captured him, too. But then something went wrong: the eight-year-old freed herself and identified the upstairs neighbor despite his mask. And the manure hit the blower. After that, the two robbers killed the whole family, for the oldest reason in the annals of crime: Dead men, and dead women and little girls, tell no tales.

To be fair, Mr. McDonald put on such a "nice guy" front that he fooled even the extended family. I can excuse an ordinary civilian for wanting to believe the best of his neighbors. But I can't excuse the police. Perhaps if they had properly investigated Mr. McDonald from the get-go, they might have spared the country what I must now acknowledge has been fruitless and pointless speculation as to whether this was an anti-Coptic or anti-Christian plot. The police were even looking for robbers--so why didn't they check out two obvious suspects who were closest to the victims?

First prize is that those two idiots will someday be executed for what they did. (The two men were definitely adults, so the Roper v. Simmons case doesn't apply here.) Second prize is that they draw life without the (further) possibility of parole and get tossed into Maximum. But I would like to suggest that someone reprimand the investigating officers for not bringing this case to a far faster closure, as they could have done.