Blood Spills On Main Street:
The Wendy’s Massacre

By LIZ GOFF

It was a death trap.

Two gunmen walked into a Wendy’s fast food restaurant at 40-12 Main St. at about 11 p.m. on the night of May 24, 2000 by asking for the store manager by name. Six employees inside the restaurant were busy cleaning and closing up, and the manager was working in his basement office when the men arrived.

In less than an hour five of the workers were dead, one was near death and another was gravely wounded.

In an act of revenge and anger, the gunmen herded the workers to the basement freezer, wrapped plastic bags around the victims’ heads – and blasted them at point-blank range. It was a crime so ruthless and grisly that it shocked seasoned homicide detectives and left crime scene cops and city morgue workers sickened.

All seven employees were shot in the head. Jean Auguste, 27, the store manager; Ramon Nazario, 44; Anita Smith, 23; Jeremy Mele, 18 and Ali Ibadat, 40, were killed instantly. Ja Quione Johnson, 18, was near death, with a bullet in his brain. And Patricio (Patrick) Castro, 23, was seriously injured.

But Castro, a quiet Ecuadorian immigrant, became the hero of the horror when he called 911, then crawled upstairs with Johnson on his back.

Thirty-six hours later, Queens Homicide detectives and detectives from Flushing’s 109th Precinct Squad arrested suspect John Taylor at his sister’s Brentwood, L.I. home. Taylor carried some deadly evidence – including the murder weapon, cash from the store robbery and the store surveillance tape, ripped from its camera by his accomplice Craig Godineaux to prevent the pair from being identified by police.

Godineaux was arrested a short while later after Taylor “gave him up” and told police where he could be found.

When the smoke cleared, both men were facing numerous capital murder charges – but that didn’t phase Taylor. Time and time again at pre-trial hearings, he glared and smirked at the victims’ families in court, secure in his belief that he would never “get the needle” by a death sentence.

Justice

The victim’s families felt cheated when, on Feb. 21, 2001, Godineaux was spared the death penalty and handed five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Godineaux pleaded guilty to 47 counts in all, but he was deemed unfit for the death penalty after he was found to be borderline mentally retarded – an element of the 1995 New York State death penalty statute.

Taylor went on trial in November 2002 in Queens Supreme Court. Following two weeks of testimony – including damning, graphic accounts of the crime by Patrick Castro and Ja Quione Johnson and the presentation of crime scene photos – a jury of seven men and five women on Nov. 19, 2002, convicted Taylor of 20 counts of murder and attempted murder. The trial lasted only three weeks.

After a separate death penalty phase, where jurors heard from the defense and prosecutors why Taylor should or should not be executed by lethal injection, the jury on Nov. 26 sentenced Taylor to death.

On Jan. 8, 2003, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Fisher signed a death warrant for Taylor’s execution for March 2, 2003. Fisher also sentenced Taylor to 325 years to life in prison for the counts for which he did not receive the death penalty.

New York State law guarantees Taylor an appeal to the New York State Court of Appeals. Taylor was “shipped immediately,” according to Fisher’s ruling, on Jan. 8, to the New York State Correctional Facility at Clinton, NY. He was appointed an attorney for his appeal process in May 2003.

Taylor is the first person to be sentenced to death in Queens since Governor George Pataki reinstated New York State’s death penalty in February 1995. He is the sixth man on New York’s Death Row – a virtual fishbowl where the condemned spend their days waiting for parole or death by lethal injection.

The victims’ families are currently preparing a lawsuit against Wendy’s charging that a lack of security equaled negligence on the part of the fast food chain, and led to the May 2000 massacre.