Detectives have a possible ID of a man found murdered in Manhattan nearly 36 years ago: He is Samuel Rivera, whose face police found in a mug shot taken when he was arrested in Florida for assault.
Now comes the hard part — finding out who killed the 20-year-old found early on Aug. 14, 1988 at a Lower East Side city-run swimming pool.
NYPD Cold Case Detective John Hidalgo said knowing the victim’s name makes the investigation more tangible.
“You’re going from a John Doe to having a picture and a name,” Hidalgo told the Daily News. “Before we had a sketch — a sketch of a dead person.
“Now we know what he looked like in real life.”
Hidalgo knew an arrest was not imminent when he was assigned the case last year. It was his first in the Cold Case unit, which he joined after spending eight years investigating hate crimes.
The victim was listed as an unidentified Latino who was stabbed in the heart during a confrontation near the pool inside Hamilton Fish Park on Pitt St. Locals have long referred to the location as the Pitt St. pool.
A sketch of the victim appeared in the Daily News in September. It was made recently by an NYPD artist based on a photograph taken of the man’s corpse.
No one since the story ran has come forward to identify the mystery man.
But since then, police have been able to check the victim’s fingerprints through databases much more sophisticated than those available when the murder took place.
Those searches came up with Rivera, who was born in born in March 1968 in Cuba and arrested for assault in Miami Beach four months before he was murdered. A records clerk in Miami Beach dug up Rivera’s mug shot.
A warrant in the Florida assault case was issued in October 1988 — two months after Rivera, who had fled to New York, was killed.
Hidalgo is not convinced Samuel Rivera is the victim’s real name. A witness told police the victim had moved to New York City from Florida and was nicknamed Cuba.
But the detective hopes someone recognizes him from the picture — and that recognition could lead to his family and eventually to his killer.
“Who knows how long he was in Miami for?” Hidalgo said. “It could have been years. It could have been months. But I’m hoping his photo out there helps us. We’d still like to talk to his family — someone who sees the picture and says, ‘That’s my boy.’”
Hidalgo is working with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to determine if there any evidence, such as clothes, from which DNA can be collected and analyzed.
Rivera’s murder was one of 1,896 reported in the city that year. It occurred a week after the Aug. 6 Tompkins Square Park riot a half-mile away, in which police confronted protesters angry about a curfew in the park, which was home to many homeless people and drug users.
Rivera may have been swimming in the pool after hours. No video cameras existed in the area then, but the case file indicates there were up to eight people involved in a fracas around the time Rivera died. The fighting is believed to have included Rivera, his killer, and their friends.
A motive for the murder has never been determined though at the time detectives did investigate the possibility it was linked to drugs or to a gang called the Avenue D Boys, Hidalgo said.
Hidalgo is hoping the renewed interest in the case will lead to someone stepping forward with more information on the murder — maybe even the person responsible.
“Who knows?” the detective said. “Maybe the person that [killed him] says, ‘They’re on to me, they’re getting closer and I can’t hide anymore.’”
