Arrest made in robberies and murders of gay men who were drugged

The New York Police Department said on Sunday a man was arrested and charged with murder in a series of killings and robberies at gay bars in Manhattan that have terrorized the city’s LGBTQ community and drawn attention to the use of drugs to incapacitate, steal and kill.

The man, Jacob Barroso, 30, of New Britain, Connecticut, was arrested on Saturday and charged with the murder of Julio Ramirez, a 25-year-old social worker who died of a drug overdose last April in what the medical examiner described. as “drug-facilitated theft”.

Mr. Barroso was also charged with robbery, robbery and impersonation, but he had not been arraigned as of Sunday evening, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said.

The deaths of Mr. Ramirez and a second man, John Umberger, a 33-year-old political consultant who was fatally drugged and robbed in May, have struck fear into the city’s LGBTQ community and sparked a wider conversation about similar drug attacks that have long plagued the city’s nightlife.

Mr Ramirez had left the Ritz, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen, with a group of men, and his body was dumped in the back of a cab on the Lower East Side shortly afterwards, his family said .

Mr Umberger disappeared after a visit to Q, another Hell’s Kitchen bar, and was found dead five days later. The medical examiner said the two were killed by similar drug cocktails containing fentanyl.

The families of Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Umberger also discovered that money had been taken from their financial accounts, using facial recognition technology on their phones.

The Ramirez family did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday. Linda Clary, Mr Umberger’s mother, said in an interview on Sunday that the case was “moving in the right direction”, even though no one had yet been charged with her son’s murder.

“I am very grateful that progress is being made in the case,” she said. “I am relieved that some of the suspects have been arrested, and I hope the last will be as well.”

In recent weeks, several people have been charged in connection with the robberies and murders of Messrs. Ramirez and Umberger. Mr Barroso is the third person to be arrested and charged in connection with the robberies in these cases, and he is the first to be charged with murder in both cases.

Last June, another man, Andre Butts, was arrested and charged with using Mr Ramirez’s credit card, hours after his death, to buy two pairs of Nike sneakers. Mr. Butts paid $544.38 for them at a SoHo store. His attorney, Terrence J. Grifferty, did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.

Last week, prosecutors charged Shane Hoskins with theft, impersonation, robbery and conspiracy. His attorney, Sarah Batool Musa, did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office charged Mr. Hoskins with being “part of a crew” linked to the drugs, robbery and murder of Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Umberger.

Much of Mr. Hoskins’ indictment remained sealed on Sunday, but the section that was made public described how prosecutors believe the crew carried out their attacks.

The indictment said the assailants would target people drinking in the bars and “administer dangerous and illicit substances to them for the purpose of inducing their incapacitation”.

They then stole phones, credit cards and other property, “once these individuals were further intoxicated and incapacitated to the point that their ability to perceive events diminished and they were unable to remember or recount these events”.

According to internal police department documents seen by The New York Times, investigators identified two similar robbery patterns targeting bars in the city.

The documents said the attackers appeared to be motivated by money, not prejudice, and that they targeted bars that catered to both gay and straight people.

Nonetheless, the crimes had a singular impact on the city’s tight-knit LGBTQ community, whose members tend to frequent, or at least know, a relatively small number of bars whose names are often household names across the city.

The crimes also occurred against an increasingly bleak backdrop for the community, which over the past year has faced an outbreak of monkeypox and an increasingly hostile national political climate.

The murders of Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Umberger were part of the same pattern of theft, according to the documents. The victims were usually drunken men who had their cellphones stolen. The perpetrators then used the cell phones to transfer large sums of money to their own bank accounts.

In its reporting on the murders of Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Umberger, The Times interviewed more than a dozen other men who were drugged in gay bars in Manhattan, then robbed and left for dead, sometimes in their homes. own ransacked apartments.

It remains unclear what substance is used to incapacitate the victims. But several men speculated that they had been drugged with GHB, a so-called “date-rape drug” readily available in New York and used recreationally in small doses by some gay men. Medical experts say date-rape drugs only stay in a person’s system for a short time and are therefore difficult to detect in tests. According to the Department of Justice, most routine drug and toxicology tests do not detect GHB at all.

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