CONCOURSE, The Bronx (PIX11) -- -- It took three-and-a-half years for the trial for the fatal stabbing and immolation of Winston Ortiz to take place.
Closing arguments were on Thursday and concluded with prosecutors playing bodycam video from an NYPD officer who responded to the crime scene and who asked a dying Ortiz who had stabbed him and lit him on fire. Ortiz, on camera, called out the name of the sole suspect in the case, Adones Betances, at least five times in his last moments of life.
The video was damning evidence, as well as intense viewing by a packed courtroom. Among the people in the gallery were the parents of the 17-year-old victim, as well as his siblings and many members of the family's church.
After the prosecution closed their argument with the bodycam video, family members and friends gathered in the hallway outside the courtroom, showing intense emotion. They wept, they embraced. One woman was so overcome she could barely stand and had to be helped up.
In comments outside of the courthouse afterward, the man for whom the victim was named, his father, Winston Ortiz, talked about the fact that his son had managed, even as he was dying, to speak the name of the man whom he said had attacked him.
"That was only by the grace of God that he was able to do anything like that," the senior Winston Ortiz said.
The teen's mother, Joan Tamarez, talked about why she had to leave the courtroom on Thursday morning during the closing arguments by the defense attorney.
The lawyer had tried to persuade the jury of seven women and five men that because Betances didn't torture Winston Ortiz, they should not give him the maximum conviction of first-degree murder if they convicted him of any crime.
"Someone stabbed and burned, [and] you're going to say that that person was not in pain?" she said outside of court. "It was impossible for me to hear all the things she had to say."
Her son Winston had been friendly with a 14-year-old girl he'd met at church.
His family said the girl stopped talking with him in the late summer of 2020. Days later, on August 12, the rising high school senior was fatally attacked in a stairwell in his building. The person he identified as his attacker, Adones Betances, 24, is the older brother of the girl.
As the jury's deliberations began, the victim's family called for justice. They said that their deep faith in God and the support of their church community had sustained them through the trauma of losing their son so brutally.
"We believe that God is just," the father said, adding that the family is praying for the jury to deliberate thoroughly.
"Even though we won't get our son back in any way," Ortiz said, "we don't want anyone to suffer the way we're suffering."
The jury asked for testimony that Betances's girlfriend had made days before the trial to be read back during their deliberations. She'd testified that later in the same day that Ortiz had died, that Betances had confessed to her that he'd carried out the murder.
The jury also requested to review most of the extensive surveillance video evidence that prosecutors said showed Betances entering Ortiz's building, attacking the teen, leaving the scene, and returning home and changing clothes.
The jury will review the video when their deliberations resume on Friday morning.
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