The heartbroken widow of a longtime Bronx fruit vendor who was brutally assaulted and bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat earlier this month says what happened to her husband was “unjust.”
In an exclusive interview with The Post, Maciel Vazquez described her husband, Leslie Sanchez, 56, as an honest, hard-working man who never messed with anyone.
“What happened to my husband is an injustice,” the mother of three told the Post on Thursday. “My husband was a good man. He wasn't a problem person.”
“I want the police and the governor to do their jobs properly.”
Romell Jarrett, 37, and Terrence Downs, 44, who allegedly attacked Sanchez's husband, were arrested the day before Sanchez's death and charged with attempted second-degree murder and first-degree assault. was indicted for.
The Bronx Prosecutor's Office said the charges could be upgraded when he is arraigned in a new indictment on Oct. 15.
According to authorities and the criminal complaint, Jarrett and Downs tackled Sanchez to the ground at Sanchez's sales floor on East Fordham Road near the Grand Concourse in Morris Heights around 7:40 p.m. on Sept. 12. He is believed to have been placed face down and hit in the head with a baseball bat. .
Police said Sanchez was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital in critical condition and died from his injuries on Sept. 14.
Law enforcement officials said the attack was unprovoked, but added that witnesses reported seeing the attacker get into an altercation with Bender.
“When I heard that a vendor had been attacked on the street, I never thought I would be attacked,” Autumn Pearson, a family friend and former neighbor, told the Post on Wednesday.
Mr. Sanchez was so badly beaten that he was forced to wear a fedora-like hat in his casket to hide the damage caused by the brutal assault, Mr. Pearson said.
He was then cremated.
Pearson said Sanchez and his wife had two sons and a daughter, and their youngest son was still a baby.
“My children miss him so much that they speak to him through pictures,” Vasquez said.
“No one understands the damage they did to me and my children.”
Romell has been arrested twice, once last month in the Bronx on charges of third-degree assault and once in May 2022 on suspicion of petty theft. Police announced.
Downs was most recently arrested in East Harlem in 2018 on charges of possession of a controlled substance, but his rap sheet also includes an attempted murder arrest in Brooklyn in December 2002, cops said. It is said that there is
Authorities said he was arrested on assault charges in Brooklyn in 2001 and faced a drug bust in Brooklyn two years earlier.
