The Brooklyn district attorney has upgraded the charges against a former city parks employee worker accused of fatally shooting a homeless Venezuelan man — now alleging the killing was motivated by a hate for migrants.
Elijah Mitchell, a seasonal Parks Department employee, is accused of targeting 30-year-old Arturo Jose Rodriguez-Marcano on July 21, three days after angrily confronting migrants living in Steuben Playground and ripping tarps from where the homeless men had been sleeping so he could clean the park.
“This defendant allegedly came to the location where the victim was staying, armed with a gun, to settle a score,” said Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez in a statement after Mitchell’s arraignment on second-degree murder as a hate crime and other charges on Wednesday. “This premeditated and coldblooded homicide is outrageous on many levels, not least because the alleged motive was hatred towards new arrivals to our city.”
Mitchell’s Brooklyn Defenders attorney couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
In a lengthy interview the 23-year-old suspect gave to NYPD detectives, made public as part of an initial disclosure from prosecutors following the arraignment, Mitchell admitted he’d argued with the homeless migrants on July 18, but denied having a gun or shooting Rodriguez-Marcano. He said he was in the park on the night of the killing, but peeing when he heard shots
“I go to work, I cut grass, and that’s it. No I don’t have a problem with the migrants,” he’d told NYPD detectives, without a lawyer, following his July 29 arrest. “I didn’t have a gun the night I heard the pop. No dudes came at me, nothing. I took a piss, I heard some sh-t, and I got up out of there.”
Mitchell faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted. His bail was set at $350,000 cash or $2.5 million bond and his next court date is set for October 23.
‘Sleeping, Eating, Sharing Stories’
Rodriguez-Marcano and other migrants had been living in the playground after being timed out of a nearby shelter.
Other young migrant men who lived alongside him had nicknamed him Ozuna, for his love of singing, after the Puerto Rican singer. A TikTok video posted by a friend showed him singing in the park shortly before his death.
“We passed the time sleeping, eating, sharing stories until it was time to sleep, that’s how it was,” said a 19-year-old migrant in Spanish, who declined to share his name fearing retaliation who spoke with THE CITY in late July near Steuben Playground.
Rodriguez-Marcano’s relatives in Venezuela are raising money to try to repatriate his body, according to a GoFundMe shared by his family.
“My brother was a happy person, charismatic, and calm, with a future ahead of him,” his sister told THE CITY last week in a WhatsApp message in Spanish, declining to share her name. “He embarked on a journey for the American dream where his life was taken by a hate crime. Xenophobia.”
THE CITY has documented how homeless encampments near large-scale migrant shelters have grown during the summer months, as adults are subjected to strict 30-day limits, and some are blocked from seeking another shelter placement, under the city’s restrictions on the long-standing right to shelter provisions for arriving migrants.
Friends of Rodriguez-Marcano said he’d been living in Steuben Playground for about two months. The park is a few blocks away from the sprawling Hall Street shelter in Clinton Hill, where he’d lived previously before his time ran out and was booted.
One friend, also from Venezuela, 21-year-old Cesar Hidalgo, said Rodriguez-Marcano had been reassigned another 30-day stint at a different shelter, and Rodriguez-Marcano had opted to stay in the park, where he knew people and the neighborhood.
“He preferred to stay here in the park like all of us,” Hidalgo said in Spanish, who was also living in the park at the time of the shooting with Rodriguez-Marcano, who spoke with THE CITY in late July.
Defendant Also Homeless
Police had initially suggested another two shootings, which took place the same evening a few blocks away outside an adjacent migrant shelter, were connected to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. Another man was charged for that double-shooting.
Judd Faulkner, a spokesperson for the city’s Parks Department confirmed Mitchell worked as a seasonal employee from May through September last year, and had been rehired this May, but was fired after his arrest.
In his lengthy interview with police detectives, Mitchell described working part time with the Parks Department as well at a shelter on Randall’s Island run by the nonprofit Hope USA, different from the large-scale tent facility for migrants.
He said despite working two jobs he was also homeless, living in his car, and trying to support his 7-year-old daughter as best he could, who he described as “my world.”
In insisting he didn’t do the crime, Mitchell said he had no beef with the new immigrants.
“If I have a problem, it’s with the government,” he told detectives, according to the transcript of his interrogation. “That’s the people who let them in here. I work seven days a week. I don’t have time to let a migrant f-ck up what I got going on in my life. They’re trying to fix their life.”
