At least three Hell’s Kitchen (NYC) bargoers said they too were drugged and robbed by an organized team of men, the same pattern that reportedly caused the mysterious death of young Hispanic Julio Ramírez.
Ramírez, a 25-year-old social worker from Brooklyn, was found dead in the back of a taxi in the early hours of April 21 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, after visiting several bars on the other side of the city, in Midtown West.
Some think that the young man of Salvadoran origin was drugged through the various drinks he had that night. Also thousands of dollars were withdrawn from his bank account in the hours and days after his death.
“And if this is a pattern, if this is a public safety issue It is very important that we keep talking about this story,” he told Pix11 the nurse Karinina Quimpo, friend and former university classmate of Ramírez.
According to Quimpo, after Ramírez’s story began drawing attention in the press in late May, he received Instagram messages from various people. For example, the father of a college student said his son had met three men on Thursday, April 7, at a gay bar on Manhattan’s 8th Avenue.
The young man made the mistake of inviting men to his apartment, where he lives with a “roommate”. “Both were drugged and the three perpetrators took their computer, phone, wallets”. When the son contacted his father, the thieves had already used the credit and debit cards.
“They committed fraud from that moment on, traveling on their Uber account,” the unidentified father said. “I suspect they checked his password, and after they took his phone, they had access to everything.”
At one point, receipts showed they tried to order six bottles of tequila worth more than $1,100 from Uber Eats, but the app ultimately canceled the delivery. The father noted: “I turned off his phone on Saturday, but they had already emptied his Apple Cash account.”
Another woman, the sister-in-law of an unidentified married man who died after leaving a bar, told Quimpo that he was “straight, white, and she thinks the same thing happened to him” as Ramírez: she went out for drinks and never came home. “He died; they think he was drugged.”
Quimpo said another young man contacted her and informed her that he, too, had been a drug survivor. “I was leaving a bar in Hell’s Kitchen; he believes they followed him to his apartment… And he woke up with no memory of what had happened, and when he read Julio’s story, it resonated with him.”
The NYC Chief Medical Examiner’s Office has yet to rule on Ramirez’s official cause of death., who began talking to three men outside the “Ritz Bar” on West 46th Street in the early hours of April 21. He was seen by surveillance walking freely to a taxi with them. His case has been ruled a homicide, but there have been no arrests so far.
He had saved $17,000 between his bank accounts, but they only left $6. “They were transfers from Zelle and Apple Cash,” said Carlos Ramírez, Julio’s older brother. “A thousand dollars, two thousand dollars, and they did it constantly until they emptied the account.”
Anyone with information should call. at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) and in Spanish 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). also through the page crimestoppers.nypdonline.org or by text message to 274637 (CRIMES), followed by TIP577. All communications are strictly confidential.
–
