Anthony Maldonado was a 9-year-old boy who was killed during a video game dispute at a relative’s home in Upper Manhattan, New York.
At around 3:35 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2010, officers with the New York Police Department were dispatched to a six-floor apartment at the Ulysses S. Grant Houses on La Salle Street after receiving a 911 call about a stabbing.
When they arrived on the scene, they found Anthony, a fourth-grade student at Lindbergh Elementary School in Palisades Park, New Jersey, suffering from multiple stab wounds.
Emergency first responders transported him to St. Luke’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 4:19 a.m.
An autopsy revealed that he sustained several stab wounds to the chest, along with a cut to his face and bruising on his arm, the NY Daily News reported.
Police officials said his injuries were an indication that there was a struggle before or during the stabbing.
Alejandro Morales, a then-25-year-old family friend with a history of mental illness, was taken to the 26th Precinct station house for questioning.
Morales was then taken to Bellevue Hospital for a mental evaluation.
Following a six-hour interrogation, police officials officially charged Morales with Anthony’s death and criminal possession of a weapon.
Police learned through an investigation that Anthony traveled from New Jersey to Upper Manhattan, New York, to spend the holiday with his mother’s family.
Just before 3 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2010, Anthony was playing video games with a group of men at his aunt and uncle’s apartment, where he had been staying.
When they left to get food, Morales stayed behind to continue playing a video game with Anthony. It was a skateboarding game on his new PlayStation system, which he received as a Christmas present.
It was during that time that investigators said Morales and Anthony got into a dispute over the game.
That’s when they believe Morales plunged a knife into the boy’s abdomen several times and slashed his face, according to the NY Times.
Anthony then knocked on his uncle’s bedroom door and said he had been stabbed before collapsing on the floor.
Earlier that day, Anthony’s mother, Dolores Juela, told reporters that she had previously spoken with her son and “everything sounded fine.”
“I can’t understand why he kill [SIC] my son,” Juela said. “I don’t know why he take my son. He is a little child.”
In July 2015, a jury deliberated for a little over 24 hours before finding Morales not guilty of murdering Anthony due to mental illness.
Morales thought he was a free man, but when his attorney, Fred Sosinsky, explained that he was going to be admitted to a hospital for further treatment, he punched him in the face.
He suffered a swollen lip and cheek.
Sosinsky said he was “thrilled with the verdict” because it “further proved his case.” And his “client’s actions follow the verdict and bespeak the degree of volatility and the severity of his mental illness,” the NY Post reported.
Sosinsky said he wasn’t going to press charges “because I’m confident that this is a result of, as I argued to the jury, a dangerously mentally ill person who needs to be in a secure psychiatric facility, not a state prison.”