 Kimberly Hanzlik (Photo: Victor Chu/New York Daily News)
At the time of the shooting, Frenchy’s was crowded, with around 100 patrons as well as bartenders and other employees. A bouncer was working the door, collecting the cover charge for the band.
Officers with the New York Police Department interviewed about 20 witnesses. Brown’s wife, Eileen, said the shooter was a white man, about 5’8”, dressed in black with a black ski mask and a hood. Eileen Brown would later testify that the shooter approached their table, drew a gun, and said, “This is for you, mother-----,” before firing several shots. As the first shot rang out, Joseph pushed Eileen toward the women's restroom, and she remained inside while the man kept firing.
Joseph Brown had a brother, Thomas Brown, and the two men looked very similar. Thomas Brown had a history of drug offenses, and the police suspected that the shooter had mistaken Joseph, a tunnel-digger, for Thomas, who had recently had a run-in with Joseph Meldish, a member of the Purple Gang, which had ties to the Mafia.
On April 14, 1999, police arrested David Thiong on unrelated charges. Thiong was an established drug dealer in the Bronx who knew Meldish. He told police that on March 21, he had taken Meldish to the Half Crowne bar, then to the home of 34-year-old Kimberly Hanzlik, Meldish’s girlfriend. He then took them to a cab company between 2-3 a.m.
Thiong was re-arrested on August 12, 1999, and again questioned about the Brown shooting. His second statement tracked his first statement.
On September 14, 1999, prosecutors and police interviewed Thiong again. This time, he also had an attorney present. Thiong said he met Meldish at the home of a man called Skinny Donny in the early morning of March 21. He said that he went with Meldish and Hanzlik to the Half Crowne Bar, but then dropped Hanzlik at her house. Thiong said he and Meldish drove to Frenchy’s. Meldish got out and went inside. Thiong said he heard about five shots and saw Meldish leave with a gun. Meldish got back in the car and they drove to Hanzlik’s home. Hanzlik got in the car and Thiong took them to a cab company.
No charges were filed at the time, and the case went cold for seven years.
In 2006, Detective Kevin Tracy began re-investigating the case and reached out to Eileen Brown. They spoke for about three hours in their first meeting. Brown did not mention seeing a strange woman at the bar. In their second meeting, on August 14, 2006, Brown said that she and her friend, Josephine, were in the women’s restroom at the bar when they saw the reflection of a woman who, she would later testify, “did not look like they fit in.”
In 2007, Thiong was arrested on drug charges in Westchester County. Because of previous convictions and a violation of his parole, he was facing a potential punishment of life in prison. He met with Tracy and now said that he had driven Meldish and Hanzlik to Frenchy’s. Hanzlik, Thiong said, had acted as the spotter, entering the bar to identify Brown’s location. (Tracy took no notes of this interview.)
Meldish and Hanzlik were arrested later that year, each charged with second-degree murder. They were tried together in Bronx County Supreme Court in February 2011, with Justice Troy Webber presiding. Jonas Gelb represented Hanzlik.
Thiong testified that he had often sold drugs to Hanzlik in 1998 and 1999. He identified her in court but said she looked “more together” than she had nearly 12 years earlier. Thiong said that in the late 1990s, Hanzlik was so emaciated that her skull was visible through her face and that he and others called her “Skeletora,” a reference to a cartoon character. Thiong testified he met Meldish around this time. Meldish was a steady customer, and Thiong would occasionally take Meldish around to bars so Meldish could either borrow or demand money from others to buy drugs.
Thiong said that on the night of March 20, he was driving Meldish around. Meldish stopped at one bar to get some money, but he returned empty-handed. Meldish told Thiong to go to Hanzlik’s house. They picked her up and drove to Frenchy’s. Outside, he said, Meldish and Hanzlik whispered to each other, then Hanzlik went inside. She returned two minutes later and told Meldish where Brown was sitting. Meldish put on a mask and went into the bar with a semi-automatic pistol.
Thiong testified he heard six shots and wanted to leave. He said Hanzlik told him to stay. Meldish got back in the car, pointed a gun at him, and told Thiong to drive him and Hanzlik to the cab company.
Later, Thiong said, Meldish threatened to kill him if he ever spoke about the shooting.
Gelb had the handwritten notes from Thiong’s third interview with police, where Thiong had said Hanzlik was not present when Thiong and Meldish went to Frenchy’s. But he did not ask Thiong about this statement and would later offer conflicting accounts of why he did not use this evidence to impeach Thiong’s testimony.
Thiong had been given immunity for his role in the Brown murder. He had also worked out a favorable resolution with prosecutors in Westchester County on his drug conviction and related parole violation issue. Gelb and Meldish’s attorney had sought information on the extent of these other deals, but Assistant District Attorney Christine Scaccia said she was not a party to those arrangements. “That’s not any deal I made with him, that’s what Westchester gave him on this case,” she said.
Eileen Brown testified about the woman she had seen in the restroom, describing her as having a “heavy-set face” and appearing to be “heavily on drugs.” She also testified that the friend who had accompanied her to the restroom had left the bar about 45 minutes before the shooting.
Scaccia asked Brown if anyone in the courtroom looks “familiar to you,” and Brown said she was “unclear.” Eventually, after a series of questions, Brown pointed to Hanzlik as the person who was familiar and later testified that a photo of Hanzlik taken in 2002 was the person she saw in the restroom.
Thomas Brown testified that he did not know Hanzlik but had two run-ins with Meldish in the months before the shooting. In February 1999, Meldish was arrested trying to break into Thomas Brown’s home. Brown said he didn’t pursue charges, because it “wasn't a serious enough case for all the aggravation it would have caused me.” Thomas Brown said he was selling drugs during this period, and Meldish approached him about borrowing $20-25. Brown said he refused the request and the two had words. He also said that he went to Frenchy’s “occasionally.”
On cross-examination, Thomas said the FBI had spoken with him after his brother’s death. A memorandum of that interview said that Thomas told the agents that his brother was “no angel,” and that it was possible that Joseph was the intended target because of a years-earlier incident involving the death of a person said to be connected with organized crime. Thomas said his brother had moved from the Bronx to Queens and kept a low profile; the night at Frenchy’s was one of the first times Joseph had returned to the Bronx.
A bouncer and a bartender testified for the defense and said they did not see Hanzlik at Frenchy’s at the time of the shooting.
On February 16, 2011, the jury convicted Meldish and Hanzlik of second-degree murder. Hanzlik was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
Hanzlik appealed, arguing that there had been insufficient evidence to convict and that Thiong’s testimony, as an accomplice, was not properly corroborated by Brown’s testimony. The New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division affirmed the conviction on May 15, 2012.
Hanzlik, now represented by Gerald McMahon, then moved for post-conviction relief, arguing that Gelb had been ineffective in his failure to cross-examine Thiong about his third statement, which excluded Hanzlik from participation in the shooting.
Justice Webber denied the motion, and the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division affirmed the ruling. The court said, “Trial counsel’s lack of recollection makes it impossible to determine whether he failed to notice this statement, which was undisputedly disclosed … or consciously chose not to use it as a matter of strategy.”
But in any event, the court said, “It was objectively reasonable to impeach the witness by means of the statements that exculpated both defendants but not by means of the statement that treated them differently.”
In 2016, Hanzlik filed a second motion for post-conviction relief, asserting that the attorney who filed the first post-conviction motion had been ineffective and that the prosecutor who defended the conviction had misled the court.
This new motion, filed by Irving Cohen, said that McMahon had not interviewed Gelb but instead had relied on the prosecutor, Robert Sandusky, to ask Gelb what happened and report back.
Gelb met with Sandusky and prepared an affirmation that said the state had failed to provide him with the typed report of Thiong’s third interview. He also said that he didn’t think he could use the hand-written notes of that meeting because it was not clear who had written the notes. (The notes stated the date of the meeting and the two detectives present.)
Sandusky asked Gelb to change his affirmation and say he had received the written report. Gelb declined to do so, and Sandusky did not provide the court or McMahon with a copy of the affirmation. Sandusky would later argue that Gelb had acted strategically in deciding not to question Thiong about the third statement. McMahon was not able to rebut this assertion, because he hadn’t seen Gelb’s affirmation.
Justice April Newbauer denied this second motion on August 24, 2016.
Hanzlik then filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on August 29, 2017. The filing repeated the claims of ineffective assistance of counsel and misconduct by Sandusky, and also asserted that the state had failed to turn over the typed statement of Thiong’s third interview.
In addition, the petition said that Scaccia had failed to correct false testimony. Thiong testified that he did not tell detectives anything different between his first two interviews, which took place in 1999, and the interview in 2007, after the case had been reopened. But that wasn’t true; he had given the third statement in 1999 that exculpated Hanzlik.
The habeas petition also said Hanzlik was innocent. Brown’s testimony of when she said she encountered Hanzlik in the restroom didn’t line up with Thiong’s testimony and the timeline of the shooting. There was no evidence that Hanzlik knew Joseph Brown or what he looked like.
In addition, the petition noted, Hanzlik had been offered and rejected an immunity deal on the eve of the trial if she took the stand against Meldish. “Ms. Hanzlik, however, despite having had no contact with Meldish for over twelve years, refused to admit to a crime of which she was totally innocent—even to avoid the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison. What guilty person would turn down such an offer?"
On May 9, 2018, Cohen wrote the court and said he had obtained a transcript of Thiong’s 2007 plea hearing in Westchester County Supreme Court. At that hearing, an assistant district attorney from Westchester County described the agreement with Thiong and said it was an “understanding between all parties, which will include the Bronx District Attorney’s Office.”
This appeared to contradict Scaccia’s statement at Hanzlik’s trial that Thiong’s deal with Westchester was independent. The transcript had been sealed at the time of Thiong’s plea, and it was never given to Hanzlik’s trial attorney.
Nine days after receiving Cohen’s letter, Judge Alvin Hellerstein stayed Hanzlik’s federal habeas proceedings, and ordered her to pursue this new claim involving the plea transcript in state court.
Hanzlik filed her third motion for post-conviction relief in June 2018. In its response, the state included a sworn statement from Scaccia saying that she had not asked Westchester County to take a particular action on Thiong’s charges, that the immunity offer was independent, and that she was not at the plea hearing and had not seen the transcript, which implied there was a joint arrangement.
After an evidentiary hearing, Justice Newbauer denied Hanzlik’s motion on April 8, 2019. She wrote that Hanzlik did not show there was “willful misconduct on the part of the people to conceal the truth.”
But Justice Newbauer also said there were some “unsettling aspects” of Scaccia’s conduct. She noted that Scaccia had told the jury that she could have influenced Thiong’s cases in Westchester while denying to the judge any such influence. In addition, Scaccia testified at the evidentiary hearing that she arranged the meeting with her counterparts in Westchester County but couldn’t remember what was discussed. Justice Newbauer called that “far-fetched.”
Hanzlik returned to federal court, amending her habeas petition to include the lack of disclosure on the plea transcript. Judge Hellerstein denied the petition on February 12, 2020. He agreed with earlier rulings that Gelb’s failure to ask Thiong about his third statement wasn’t ineffective assistance and that the details of Thiong’s plea deal, if it was concealed, didn’t merit a new trial.
Judge Hellerstein noted that Thiong’s cross-examination extended to nearly 300 pages, where jurors learned of his extensive criminal record, the inconsistencies in many of his previous statements to authorities, and the plea deals Thiong had received. He said the plea transcript would not have made a material difference at trial.
In 2021, Cohen asked the Conviction Integrity Bureau (CIB) in the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office to review the case.
On November 26, 2024, the district attorney’s office joined a new request by Cohen to vacate Hanzlik’s conviction.
In a statement, prosecutors said their reinvestigation supported Hanzlik’s claim that the eyewitness identification used to convict her was unreliable.
The statement said that Detective Tracey, who secured Eileen Brown’s identification of Hanzlik seven years after the shooting, had been found to have coerced a false identification that led to the wrongful conviction of Antonio Mallet.
Separately, the CIB had found a previously undisclosed document from 1999 that contained information provided by Thiong that said Hanzlik was not present at the time of the shooting.
At a hearing on November 26, Administrative Judge Alvin Yearwood granted motions to vacate Hanzlik’s conviction and dismiss her case. She was released from prison that day, two days before Thanksgiving.
“They’ll have a lot to be thankful for,” said Cohen, who represented Hanzlik pro bono for seven years. “She’s doing really well. It’s been a long time since I had somebody released from the court. It’s quite exciting.”
– Ken Otterbourg
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