At Brooklyn Trial, a Motive in Child’s Murder Remains Elusive

NEW YORK — After all of the evidence was presented — from police detectives, medical experts, grieving relatives and from one of the young victims — the jury seemed no closer to getting the answer to a crucial question in the trial of Daniel St. Hubert.

While several witnesses had testified in detail as to how St. Hubert had killed one child and left a second fighting for her life in an elevator of a Brooklyn public housing project, none of them in nearly three weeks of proceedings had managed to say why.

When P.J. Avitto, 6, was stabbed to death and Mikayla Capers, 7, was gravely wounded on a Sunday afternoon four years ago, the crimes sent shock waves through the city — not only because they were hideously violent, but also because they seemed so random and unthinkable. On June 1, 2014, the two best friends had been outside playing in the late-spring sun then took an elevator at the Boulevard Houses in East New York up toward P.J.'s apartment where they wanted to fetch Icees. A man stepped aboard behind them and stabbed them more than 30 times. P.J. died in a pool of blood. Mikayla was hospitalized for days with 16 gashes running from her neck to her knees.

Four years later, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office and St. Hubert’s lawyer are locked in a struggle, disputing what occurred that day. As the trial came to a close Thursday afternoon, the prosecutors said that St. Hubert — “a hulking monster” — followed the children from a playground and knifed them in the elevator, which was not much more than an arm-span wide. The lawyer, Howard Greenberg, ridiculed that theory, saying it was built on “junk science” and that several of the witnesses, including Mikayla, lied.

From the outset of the case, the brutal attacks on P.J. and Mikayla seemed all but inexplicable and baffled the police. There was no surveillance footage of the stabbings and an army of detectives canvassed the neighborhood for days, going door to door and ultimately interviewing dozens of potential suspects. Their big break came when a DNA sample on an 8-inch blade that was left behind matched St. Hubert’s DNA, which was on file in a state criminal database.

When the police arrested St. Hubert, he had recently been released from prison, where he had served a five-year term for trying to kill his mother. He had long a criminal record and a history of mental illness. He told the first investigators who questioned him, “Satan has powers and controls things.”

In the days that followed his arrest, a public debate emerged about how the city treated prisoners with psychiatric problems. It seemed at first that St. Hubert might mount an insanity defense, but two psychiatric evaluations concluded that he was competent for trial. He is charged with second-degree murder and with attempted murder.

At the trial, in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn, St. Hubert, 31, sat beside his lawyer each day, mostly stone-faced and wearing a rosary. It was the victim’s loved ones who often showed emotion. When gory photographs of P.J.'s body and the elevator’s bloody floor were introduced as evidence, the children’s relatives gasped and wept.

Though the early investigation progressed in fits and starts, by the time the trial began, the prosecution had amassed a trove of evidence. That included four separate witnesses who claimed they had seen St. Hubert leaving the building where the stabbings occurred and cellphone records that placed him in the area at the time of the attacks. There was also the DNA connecting him to the knife and the testimony of Mikayla, now 11, who said that St. Hubert had suddenly assaulted her and P.J. after they were chatting in the elevator and refused his order to shut up.

In his closing argument Thursday, Greenberg took the risky tack of going after Mikayla, telling the jury that she was “delusional” and “a pathological liar.” The girl had not been completely truthful on the stand, having testified that she had picked out St. Hubert in a photograph while she was in the hospital, when in fact the first time she identified him was in court.

Addressing the jury with notes scrawled on napkins and loose scraps from a legal pad, Greenberg also sought to discredit the DNA evidence, which he described as “statistical lies.” He claimed his client was a “patsy” who was “convicted” by the media after being framed by the police.

In his own summation, the lead prosecutor, Patrick O’Connor, led the jury through what each witness had seen and included St. Hubert’s movements on the day of the attacks. He reminded the panel not only that the defendant’s DNA had been discovered on the handle of the weapon, but also that a set of matching knives had been found at the homeless shelter where he had been living when the children were attacked.

But it was only toward the end of his presentation that O’Connor addressed the issue of a motive. The jurors, who will be on a break next week, will not begin deliberations until April 9, but as O’Connor prepared to leave the case in their hands, he said that St. Hubert had “a generalized intent to harm society” and wanted “to put the fear of God in Brooklyn.”

“He was out there to kill,” he said.