Just hours after he got bailed out of Rikers April 20 after being charged in the death of his baby daughter, Daniel Auster, the long-troubled son of novelist Paul Auster, was found unconscious on a subway platform in Brooklyn.
Police spotted Daniel, 44, lying on the northbound platform of the G train in the Washington/Clinton Avenue station. Drugs and drug paraphernalia were found on him, they said.
On Tuesday, Daniel was reportedly taken off life support. The cause of death was the same as what killed his 10-month-old infant, Ruby, last fall, sources said: an accidental drug overdose.
Daniel’s death was the final sad act in a dark life marked by chronic drug abuse and bookended by two tragic drug-related deaths — the last one 26 years ago.
On April 15, Daniel was arrested and charged with second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and endangering the welfare of Ruby. In November, he’d told police he’d injected himself with heroin and taken a nap, only to wake and find his daughter unconscious and unresponsive. An autopsy later concluded that the baby died of an overdose of fentanyl and heroin. Police still don’t know how Ruby ingested the drugs although Daniel admitted he had glassine packets of heroin in the apartment, prosecutors said in court.
In March 1996, Daniel was 18 and inside the Hell’s Kitchen apartment when infamous New York party promoter Michael Alig, then 31, and Robert “Freeze” Riggs, 28, murdered drug dealer Andre “Angel” Melendez. The murder was once described as a “catfight” over a drug debt gone horribly wrong.
Daniel’s role in the grisly slaying at Apartment 3K at the Riverbank West complex, however, has always been shrouded in mystery and little-known to the public.
Daniel and Alig, who became known as the “Club Kid Killer,” had been lovers for a time before the Melendez murder, according to one of Alig’s former Club Kid friends, James St. James.
“Daniel and Michael were a match made in hell,” St. James said. “They brought out the worst in each other, especially when it came to drugs. They were doing ecstasy and free-basing cocaine and there was a lot of GHB and ketamine around.”
St. James chronicled Alig’s rise and fall as “King of the Club Kids” in his book, “Disco Bloodbath,” which was the basis for the 2003 film “Party Monster,” starring Macaulay Culkin.
Ten days after the murder, with the corpse decomposing in the bathtub, Alig chopped up Melendez’s body and he and Riggs threw the torso in an Amana TV box into the Hudson River. The two were arrested in December 1996, sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison, and eventually released. Alig died of a heroin overdose on Christmas Eve 2020.
In 1998, a year after Alig and Riggs were sent to prison, Daniel pleaded guilty to possessing $3,000 that had been stolen from Melendez’s corpse, without being interviewed by NYPD detectives investigating the murder. Daniel’s father Paul reportedly had some connection to the Manhattan DA that led to a meeting where his son gave information on the killing, which may have helped him avoid more serious charges.
Riggs told the judge at his sentencing that, “What I am certain is that all of us involved, myself, Michael Alig, Daniel Auster and Angel Melendez, are victims of the same hideous evil, whose name is drugs.”
At the time the murder case was being prosecuted, no one had publicly said Daniel had a role in the killing. (Riggs’ hand-written confession after his arrest did not mention Daniel. Riggs was not reachable for comment.) But in a Post interview in 2014, Alig recounted the chaos and fighting in the apartment leading up to the murder of Melendez.
“Everything was in a state of disarray,” Alig said. “There was a hammer on the table and [Riggs] reached for the hammer and hit [Melendez] with the wooden handle. [Melendez] fell back and there was me and Daniel Auster and Riggs all piled on Angel. Angel was still trying to bite me and I wrapped a sweatshirt around my hand … and I smashed into his face to try to push him down. I either did it for too long or had more strength than I realized or maybe it was a combination of us sitting on top of him and he couldn’t breathe or whatever it was, he just stopped writhing.”
Alig added, “We’d been up for four days. We were using crystal meth and we were on ketamine and Rohypnol and cocaine …. Daniel threw water on [Melendez’s] face and he didn’t wake up. That’s when we got that sinking feeling in our stomach.”
Alig’s lawyer, the high-profile criminal defense attorney Gerald McMahon, told The Post that Daniel “skated” at the time because the Alig case was tied up with a bigger investigation of notorious nightclub kingpin Peter Gatien — and also because Daniel’s father was friendly with then-Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau.
“I told the DA that Daniel was involved and that [investigators from the DA’s office] were hiding it and that I intended to call the kid during the trial in our defense. I had subpoenaed him,” McMahon said.
McMahon added that he had done some “digging” that proved to him Daniel’s novelist father had some influence with Morgenthau. The DA’s office offered few details about the case when The Post asked about it last week. Morgenthau died in 2019.
Not long after McMahon subpoenaed Daniel to testify at Alig’s trial, the DA’s office abruptly lowered their plea offer for Alig to what McMahon said he wanted: a “sweet” deal to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter.
As a result there was no trial and no call for Daniel to testify.
“This all happened right after I said I was going to subpoena the kid,” McMahon said.
Det. Ralph Gengo and retired Det. Tom Comis, who worked in the detective bureau at the 122 Precinct in Staten Island, were assigned to the case when the box containing Melendez’s armless and legless torso washed up on the shores of Staten Island. But, according to Gengo, Morgenthau’s office in Manhattan took over the case and Gengo and Tomis had to fight to be kept on as investigators.
After they arrested Alig and Riggs, the two cops were told to stand down and all their files on the case mysteriously disappeared from their office, Gengo told The Post last week.
“It was a strange case from day one,” Gengo said.
Alig’s arrest, conviction and sentencing took place amid Morgenthau’s attempt to bring down Gatien — who owned the notorious Limelight, where Alig was a major presence, along with several other clubs.
Gatien came into the crosshairs of both Morgenthau and then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who knew of the drug activity at Gatien’s clubs and who saw him as a big fish that needed to be caught as Giuliani tried to clean up New York City. Prosecutors went easy on Alig because he initially had agreed to testify against Gatien as the star witness in a drug-racketeering case against the club owner, sources told The Post.
“The DA wanted to get Gatien and they wanted Alig to help them do that,” said Ramon Fernandez, director of the documentary, “Glory Daze: The Life and Times of Michael Alig.” “They didn’t care about this [Hispanic] Angel Melendez. He was very low on the totem pole. They were going after Gatien as if he were Al Capone.”
(Gatien was acquitted of drug-racketeering and conspiracy charges in 1998 but was deported to Canada in 2003 after pleading guilty to tax evasion charges.)
Fernandez interviewed dozens of people involved with the Melendez case, including Alig and the cops who found Melendez’s body.
“Daniel was just whisked away,” Fernandez said. “The cops never got to speak to him. He was a child of privilege. Alig and the others didn’t come from much but Daniel did. I think [the Auster family] sent [Daniel] away after that and nobody saw him for a long time.”
Paul Auster has been considered one of New York’s largest literary lions for decades and is best-known for his bestselling “New York Trilogy,” first published in 1985, and novels such as “The Music of Chance,” “City of Glass” and “Sunset Park.” His second wife is the novelist Siri Hustvedt, Daniel’s stepmother.
In journalist Frank Owen’s 2003 book, “Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture,” he writes that Daniel was “whisked out of the city to a secret location” by Paul Auster after the Melendez murder, and that at some point his father arranged a meeting between Daniel and DA Morgenthau.
“Morgenthau had a reputation for treating celebrities with kid gloves,” Owen writes. “A meeting was arranged at which Daniel told DA investigators that he’d heard Alig and Freeze plotting to stick up Angel for his stash the day before his death.” But, Owen writes, the DA decided the “junkie Daniel was an unreliable witness.”
Neither Paul nor Hustvedt have ever commented on Daniel publicly. But they both have featured young male characters who appear to be thinly-veiled versions of Daniel in their novels.
In Hustvedt’s “What I Loved,” she writes about the troubled relationship between an artist, Bill Wechsler, and his drug-addict son, Mark, and the son’s stepmother, Violet. In the novel, Mark goes from a sweet boy to a troubled, dangerous teenager who upsets his father and scares his stepmother.
Bill and Violet meet in the downtown art scene of the 1970s and ’80s, and she helps Bill raise Mark, his son from a previous marriage. Mark gets mixed up with a downtown artist, Teddy Giles, who brutally murders a Club Kid named Rafael Hernandez.
In the novel, Mark Wechsler is rumored to be Giles’ lover and is cited as a possible accomplice in the slaying. Mark’s family hires a lawyer for him who used to work in the DA’s office, and he is eventually exonerated.
“Violet had long suspected that Mark hadn’t told the full truth about the murder,” Hustvedt wrote. “Mark had fooled him the way he had fooled us all …. I knew that by some definition both Teddy Giles and Mark … were insane, examples of an indifference many regard as monstrous and unnatural; but in fact they weren’t unique and their actions were recognizably human.”
Paul also wrote a character seemingly based on Daniel into his 2004 novel, “Oracle Night.” The story is narrated by a writer called Trause — an anagram of the name Auster — who has a drug-addicted son who terrorizes his stepmother.
“I remember he really did terrorize his stepmother. She wasn’t making that up in her books,” St. James told The Post about Daniel. “He was a demon child, like Damien from ‘The Omen.’ I also remember that Daniel wanted to be a serial killer. He was obsessed with the serial killer character in the book ‘American Psycho.'”
Little is known about Daniel’s life as an adult. He was reportedly living in Florida for a while and worked as a DJ and landscaper in recent years. His apartment in Park Slope is about a mile from his father’s Brooklyn home. It is not known whether Ruby was his only child.
At the time of Ruby’s death, he was living with his partner, Zuzan Smith, 25, who told police that Ruby was alert and awake when she left to go to work that day. Smith did not return repeated calls from The Post.
When The Post reached Paul Auster at home and asked about Daniel’s tragic death and the other allegations in this story, he said “no comment” and told the reporter not to call him again.
But former friends of Daniel said they were shocked that his life ended in such a way, even knowing his dark past.
“I feel like the baby was the final victim of that Club Kids and drugs era,” Ramon Fernandez said. “The pull of heroin is so strong.”
