By JOSEPH KELLARD
The incident involved Tafare Berryman, 22, a Brooklyn varsity basketball player at C.W. Post, who left the scene of a riot outside an Island Park nightclub last April 3 but was gunned down at the intersection of Long Beach Road and Henrietta Avenue not long afterward. Despite a reward offered for the capture of Berryman¹s killer that was increased last July, police had little evidence to work with. They hope the murder¹s nationwide exposure will finally lead to an arrest.
³There was a lot of persistence on our part,² said Detective Sgt. Dennis Barry of the county¹s Homicide Squad about the efforts to get the case on ³Most Wanted.² Barry said that the case was aired last Saturday for two main reasons: the one-year anniversary of the murder was approaching, and the NCAA basketball playoff tournament was in full swing, which tied in with Berryman¹s profile as a collegiate player.
³We were able to pursue that angle and prevail upon the producers to air this,² Barry said.
Jon Leiberman, the ³Most Wanted² reporter who produced Saturday¹s segment on Berryman, told the Herald that while these factors were natural tie-ins, he stressed that the student-athlete¹s story ‹ his working his way out of Brooklyn, earning a scholarship to attend C.W. Post with aspirations to be either a police officer, a Wall Street trader or a pro basketball player in Australia ‹ was a compelling one.
³Also that he was gunned down in cold blood for no apparent reason is horrible,² Leiberman added. ³Š And Dawn Thompson [Berryman¹s mother] and her family have suffered so much here. [Thompson, a Jamaican native,] told us Tafare was her American dream. He was everything to her family. We just want to bring that family some justice through airing Tafare¹s case.²
Last week, when Barry announced that Berryman¹s case would air on ³Most Wanted,² he revealed that members of the Latin Kings gang were suspects in the case. ³All we know is that there were Latin King members who were present at the [Island Park] club on the night of the incident,² he said about the then La Mansion nightclub at 3942 Long Beach Road, which the gang reportedly frequented at the time of the murder.
Berryman and his friend, Aaron Daly, 19, were at the club attending a C.W. Post fashion show after-party, and were among the hundreds of people who spilled outside to find that a riot had broken out in a parking lot across the street. ³Multiple skirmishes outside with fistfights, bottles being broken, people being slashed and shots being fired,² said Detective Jim Carroll, describing the scene in the ³Most Wanted² segment. In the midst of all this, an unknown assailant stabbed Daly in the forehead with a broken bottle. Daly then got into his car with Berryman, and drove north on Long Beach Road to find a hospital.
Blood dripping into Daly¹s eyes impaired his vision, so he pulled over just before Henrietta Avenue. He got out of the car, leaving the driver¹s-side door open, and walked around to the passenger¹s side as Berryman slid over into the driver¹s seat to take the wheel. Just then, at about 5:05 a.m., a gray, midsize, four-door, foreign car pulled up alongside the car and two shots rang out, one hitting Berryman in the chest, police reported. Berryman died shortly afterward at Long Beach Hospital.
Police interviewed well over 100 people about the riot and murder, but were unable to discover how, exactly, the fighting started and who may have shot Berryman. The county police announced a $10,000 reward for anyone with information that could lead police to Berryman¹s killers last July 13, about the same time they initially appealed to ³Most Wanted² to air the case. Some credible leads came in that police pursued, but they still weren¹t enough to crack the case.
³What is unique about this case is that it is one of the few open, unsolved murders that we have here in Nassau County,² Barry said.
Since the investigation began, he explained, police have found no evidence that Berryman, who was on the dean¹s list at C.W. Post, had any problems with anyone, nor was he involved in anything crime-related. ³What¹s particularly troubling about the case is that the more you looked into the background of the victim, the more you realize what a hard-working individual this young man was,² Barry said. Barry added that Daly, 20, a Manhattan resident who played alongside Berryman on the C.W. Post team, ³was from a similar mold.²
³Tafare is the kind of son that every mother would want to have,² Thompson said in her interview with ³Most Wanted.²
The show requests that anyone who knows anything about Berryman¹s murder call its hotline, (800) CRIME TV, and police ask that they call the county¹s Crime Stoppers unit at (800) 244-TIPS. Providers of information to both sources will remain anonymous.
Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 287.
