Ligia Zerpa, 23, fidgeted in her seat, a tear slipping down her cheek on Tuesday afternoon as she anxiously waited for her boyfriend’s name to be called by Judge Laura Ward.
“What horrible despair, I can’t take it,” she said in Spanish.
As Kelvin Servita-Arocha, 19, emerged handcuffed in a tan sweatsuit, along with two other defendants, Zerpa jockeyed for his sightline, whispering his name while drawing an angered glance from a court officer stationed a few feet away.
Servita-Arocha’s lawyer, Michael Hurwitz, asked the judge to consider supervised release for his client, who was accused of kicking a police radio during a now infamous Jan. 28 assault on two police officers outside a migrant shelter in Times Square.
“He’s not accused of taking part in the direct assault of the police officers,” Hurwitz said. “There’s no indication he has a record. He’s a young man, I would ask your honor to perhaps consider supervision.”
Ward waived off the request.
“I’m not going to address bail at this point,” she said.
Within 15 minutes, the young men were ushered to the exits and out of sight, on their way back to lock-up ahead of a court appearance on May 14. Zerpa burst into tears as she left the courtroom.
“All that we went through to get here for this to happen,” she said. “It’s all for vengeance, all because we’re immigrants.”
A viral 45-second video clip of the attack on police officers in Times Square on Jan. 28 seized national attention, as it was replayed endlessly on Fox News and online and even in a pro-Trump campaign ad.
Nine weeks later, the incident — in which prosecutors say one officer suffered a cut on his nose and bruising on his face and bicep, and the other from lingering shoulder pain — has largely receded from the national and even the local conversation. Two of the men accused of the most serious conduct, kicking the officers in the head and leg, remain at large.
But two friends, Servita-Arocha and 21-year-old Wilson Juarez, neither of whom are accused of touching the officers are both being detained on Rikers Island, after being apprehended mysteriously by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Both are waiting to learn how a scuffle that was over almost as quickly as it began may reshape their lives.
Juarez, who was accused of tampering with evidence for trading a jacket with another suspect after the fight, said he spends most of his day in his cell afraid of getting attacked.
“Every day’s a struggle,” Juarez said in a phone call with THE CITY.
‘He Was Going To Be Head of the Family’
Servita-Arocha started working at around age 11 in the city of Maracay, Venezuela, starting with overnight shifts with his mother at a supermarket while going to school by day, according to family members interviewed by THE CITY. He dropped out of high school a year before graduating and moved to Peru with his older brother, where they worked at a car wash before deciding to try to make their way to the United States. He arrived in New York City last fall, living in a migrant shelter in Brooklyn.
Juarez, one of six siblings, was the first to make it to the United States, the father of a two-year-old who he hoped to support from abroad. Barbara Juarez Aguilarte, Juarez’ 24-year-old sister, said the whole family saved up $800 to help him make his way across the border.
“He was going to be head of the family and help us all get there,” she said in a WhatsApp call from Colombia, where she lives.
Juarez and Servita-Arocha met by chance after making it to New York City and became friends, along with 17-year-old Yarwuin Madris, who would also be charged in the Times Square fight.
Through a friend who lived at the Row Hotel, a shelter in Midtown, the friends met a Venezuelan family who was living in an apartment in the Fordham neighborhood of The Bronx last fall. Servita-Arocha started dating one of the sisters, 23-year-old Zerpa, and all three of the young migrants would regularly visit and help around the house. In January, Madris and Juarez moved into the Bronx apartment to help with chores and childcare. Later that month Servita-Arocha joined them, after the city evicted him from a shelter on 30 days’ notice.
“We saw they were good people, so we let them stay,” Zerpa, the mother of a 4-year-old boy, said in Spanish.
Her mother, age 48, a housecleaner who arrived in the United States three years earlier, shares the three-bedroom apartment with her two daughters and their five kids, along with friends and acquaintances who need a place to crash, with mattresses strewn in common areas to accommodate those guests.
“It breaks my heart. Those children don’t have anyone here,” the elder Zerpa said in Spanish.
“I opened the doors to them because I’m the mother of this house,” Zerpa said. “They’re not criminals. They’re humble boys.”
An ‘Ugly Betty’ Blowup
The stretch of West 42nd Street sidewalk outside an adult migrant shelter in a converted office building was a regular hang-out spot for not just residents of the shelter but also delivery workers taking a break from zipping around Manhattan on mopeds and ebikes. They would hang out on the concrete bollards, have a bite to eat, smoke cigarettes and socialize with one another.
On the evening of the fight, NYPD Lieutenant Ben Kurian and Officer Zunxu Tian ordered the men to leave.
Video of the incident released by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office shows the men walking away as the officers had instructed them to, when a man in a yellow jacket identified as Yohenry Brito said to another member of the group in Spanish, “He looks like Ugly Betty.”
One of the officers then grabbed Brito and pressed him against the wall of an adjacent building, triggering the now infamous fight as the men who’d been walking off returned to try and free Brito.
Prosecutors said Madris is seen on the video tugging one of the officers back. They say Servita-Arocha kicked a police radio while Juarez, who they allege was an onlooker to the fight, traded a jacket with Madris afterward.
‘The Right Person’
Servita-Arocha and Juarez were arrested in the hours after the incident, arraigned on assault charges and released on their own recognizance, sparking ire from police and pundits.
Police sources told news outlets that four of the men initially arrested, including Juarez and Servita-Arocha, had skipped town and taken buses to California. NYPD top brass took to the national airwaves to excoriate a judge in the case and Bragg for letting the men out.
“They walk out the door. They’re on a bus somewhere in America, going somewhere right now,” NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said in a Feb. 2 interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
In fact, Juarez and Servita-Arocha were still living in the Bronx apartment. “We were going to church that weekend,” Zerpa said of Servita-Arocha.
Bragg’s office faced backlash for agreeing to the initial release of those arrested, as his office said it was working to determine whether or not the men had been correctly identified and charged.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, said the men should have been in jail whether or not they were involved.
“They wanted to make sure they had the right person,” Hochul said on Morning Joe. “But you can hold these people while you’re still investigating. You don’t let them out.”
Two other men initially arrested and charged by police with assault were later cleared of any involvement by Bragg’s office.
Hochul’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment from THE CITY.
Criminal and Immigration Systems Deeply Intertwined
Everyone inside the Zerpa family’s apartment was sleeping when the police knocked on the door at around 4 a.m. on Feb. 13 to arrest Madris, who had yet to be apprehended.
But law enforcement officers took Servita-Arocha and Wilson away in handcuffs, as well, and the pair was placed in ICE’s custody.
It’s unclear if ICE officers were with the police when they made the arrests, or if the NYPD took the three into custody and then passed them to immigration authorities. The first scenario would be highly unusual for a routine arrest warrant, the second a violation of the city’s sanctuary policies barring police from enforcing federal immigration laws or honoring ICE requests to detain immigrants in a situation such as this one, explained Rosa Cohen-Cruz, the Director of Immigration Policy for The Bronx Defenders, which is representing Servita-Arocha in his deportation proceeding.
The NYPD and ICE haven’t responded to multiple requests from THE CITY for clarification on what happened that morning. Both Servita-Arocha and Wilson ended up in an immigration detention center in Orange County, 60 miles north of the city, before being transferred to a city jail on Rikers Island days later.
While the NYPD and other New York City agencies are barred from participating in federal immigration enforcement, there’s no recourse if the law is violated. Mayor Eric Adams has said he doesn’t agree with the sanctuary protections as they stand.
The mystery of Servita-Arocha and Wilson’s delivery into ICE’s custody “raises troubling questions about whether our local laws are being followed by this administration,” said Yasmine Farhang, the director of advocacy at the Immigrant Defense Project. “New Yorkers deserve to know the extent to which the city is doing ICE’s dirty work.”
‘In Prison in Our Own House’
Soon after their apprehension by ICE, immigration officials put out a statement saying both Juarez and Servita-Arocha are affiliated with the “Tren de Aragua” gang, a claim family members who spoke with THE CITY in Venezuela and Colombia balked at, as did Arocha’s girlfriend.
“They’re from the state of Aragua, not the train of Aragua,” Zerpa said. (Tren is the Spanish word for “train.”)
“I think those people got confused. But no one believes us. Nobody believes us.”
Three days after the two were arrested again, ICE passed them off to marshals to return to court for arraignment. The district attorney downgraded the assault charge against Juarez leaving him accused only of tampering, for allegedly trading jackets with Madris.
Back at the apartment, NYPD officers guarded the Zerpa family’s door for two days, telling them they wouldn’t be allowed back in if they left. THE CITY visited the family, and officers on scene confirmed that no one who left the apartment would be permitted to return. The kids missed school, and by the second day they’d run out of food.
The NYPD didn’t return a request for comment on the situation.
“It’s as if we were in prison in our own house,” Zerpa told THE CITY at the time.
By the afternoon of the second day, the two officers stationed at their apartment door at the time took pity on the family and let them out for a brief trip to buy supplies. That evening, officers appeared with a search warrant and turned the apartment upside down, breaking several doors and smashing up an armoire they later dragged out in black construction bags. Police confiscated all the mobile devices and the one laptop inside the apartment.
“The few things we had, they broke,” Zerpa’s mother said.
‘In God’s Hands’
Servita-Arocha and Juarez remain on Rikers Island as the cases wend their way through the city’s courts, along with at least three others accused of playing a role in the fight. No matter how the friends’ cases resolve, they’ll have deportation to fend off after that.
“That’s what the government is seeking for this 19-year-old young man,” said Perry McAninch, supervising attorney in the immigration practice at the Bronx Defenders. “In the other possible future — the one that we hope will come to pass — Kelvin has the opportunity to live the life he chooses to lead, safely and without the threat of deportation looming indefinitely over him.”
Ahead of his Tuesday court date, 21 family friends and relatives from Venezuela sent voice memos attesting to Kelvin-Arocha’s character, hoping to convince a judge to release him from jail while his case proceeds. His detention has sent shockwaves through circles of friends and neighbors back in Maracay.
“We are all floored to see our family members there in this situation, and all of us here with our hands tied and no way to help.” said Servita-Arocha’s uncle Jose Arocha in Spanish, speaking to THE CITY on a WhatsApp call from Venezuela. “He’s always been hardworking and dedicated to his studies.”
Zerpa and Servita-Arocha talk almost every day on the phone, about the future they still hope to have, where he would work as an electrician and the couple and Zerpa’s son would live in an apartment of their own.
Zerpa said she’s leaning on her faith in God to get her through the separation and uncertainty.
“God knows Kelvin’s heart, and he knows that we aren’t bad people. He knows the dreams we have ahead of us,” she said. “I calm myself knowing I’m leaving everything in God’s hands.”