Four days was all it took for 54-year-old Carlton Henderson to go from a defendant in a 1988 Boston double murder to dead after stumbling out of a New York City restaurant’s walk-in freezer, yelling about Satan and collapsing in the kitchen never to get up.
Henderson, an Arizona resident, bolted Sunday out of the freezer of Sarabeth’s restaurant on the Upper West Side, where police said he was later found unresponsive and rushed to an area hospital.
“Away from me, Satan,” Henderson yelled, according to the New York Post, as he grabbed a knife and threatened the kitchen staff. He collapsed after struggling with the workers.
Police said he was rushed to Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital, where he died. An investigation into how he ended up in the freezer is ongoing, and the New York medical examiner is working to determine his cause of death, cops said.
Until last week, Henderson was on ice in the Bay State — held behind bars without bail and awaiting trial for the 1988 Roxbury murders of 26-year-old William Medina and 22-year-old Antonio Dos Reis.
Medina was shot in the head and Reis in the chest, police said at the time, and officers found $20,000 in cash in a brown paper bag in the car they were in. The case was reopened periodically, including in 1991, according to a Herald report that described the crime as “execution-style murders” during a drug deal with the “markings of a set-up.”
Police arrested Henderson last year — nearly 30 years after the killings — and claimed to have evidence he admitted to involvement in the murders.
That evidence tying Henderson to the murders was tossed by Suffolk Superior Court Judge Janet Sanders last week, when she ruled it was obtained after Henderson had been promised immunity by FBI agents investigating a San Diego drug ring.
In the interview, Henderson implicated two brothers in the double murder, court papers say. It’s unclear what Henderson said that implicated himself in the murders.
One of the people Henderson named in the killings died months after the 1993 interview, and the drug kingpin Leslie Rogers, who Henderson said ordered the hit, was killed by Los Angeles police, according to the judge’s order tossing Henderson’s statements.
Suffolk prosecutors argued to keep the evidence, saying Henderson had not been able to prove such an agreement existed. No written “queen for a day” or “immunity” contract was kept by attorneys, according court records. However, Henderson’s defense attorney testified that a written agreement was made.
On July 31, the judge accepted the testimony and suppressed Henderson’s comments about the killings, and the next day he was released from custody. His next court date was scheduled for Aug. 14, when prosecutors were expected to decide whether to appeal the judge’s order.
“It’s a real tragedy. It’s terrible,” Henderson’s attorney John Amabile told the Herald. “I feel real terrible that this happened to Carlton.”
Henderson was heading to California to stay with his sister, Amabile said, which is what the court authorized him to do when he was released.
