THE prosecutor’s words were like razor blades ripping apart the old wounds.
Painfully, one by one, the family members of the May 2000 Wendy’s massacre began to fall apart yesterday inside a Queens courtroom.
By the time Assistant District Attorney Daniel Saunders meticulously described how the five fast-food workers were executed, the first-floor courthouse hallway was awash with tears, uncontrollable heartbeats and sorrow.
About half of the two rows in the courtroom designated for the victims’ families were empty by the time Saunders was finished.
The description was merciless – but the family members didn’t hold it against the prosecutor because they want the confessed killer, John Taylor, to pay for the crime.
The relatives would cringe at the mere mention of their son, daughter, brother or sister.
Some thought about saying “the hell with it” and pummeling Taylor.
Joshua Hall, 16, whose older brother Jeremy Mele was killed, said listening to the details made him “sick” to his stomach.
“I tried to hold back as much as I could,” Hall said, describing his desire to strangle Taylor. “I couldn’t do anything. I wanted to avoid a mistrial.”
As he spoke, the excruciating cries of Ramon Nazario’s mother, wife and sisters penetrated the door of the women’s restroom.
Nazario’s 64-year-old mother, Ramona, appeared exhausted in grief. She was so weak that family members had to help her out of the courtroom.
After two years of medication and family therapy that gave her some semblance of a normal life, the prosecutor’s words sucked the air right out of her lungs, said her son Benjamin, 48, who also wanted to get his hands around Taylor’s neck.
When Saunders began describing how Jean-Dumel Auguste, 27, was suffocating and writhing in pain and how Taylor beat him down and tied him up even tighter, one family member was seen crying in agony.
Auguste’s sister couldn’t take it and left the courtroom, only to stand in a corner just outside the door in tears, staring at the wall as if she was witnessing her brother’s death live.
Every time a family member tried to sit through the details of death, they realized that it was just too much.
That’s the painful price of justice that only a family member of a murder victim could understand.