Max
05-20-2003, 04:57 PM
A Stranger's Bullets
Cheeoma Joseph had finished her shift as a topless dancer and was headed home. She was stalked and shot. She was 18.
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Photos
Cheeoma Joseph (Newsday/Ken Spencer)
Michael Taffinder (Suffolk County Police Photo)
The Carousel Club in Huntington Station (Newsday/Ken Spencer)
Special Section
Full Coverage: Shooter Stalked Nightclub Dancers
Top Stories
Hempstead Redraws Lines Over Protests
Coalition Formed To Push For More Openness on Plum Island Safety
Great Neck Eye Doctor Pleads Guilty To Medicare Fraud
Looking Beyond County
Cops Usher In Hurry-up Baby
By Sandra Peddie
STAFF WRITER
May 21, 2003
They called her Heaven. Long-limbed, with almond- shaped eyes and a sleek body, she danced for men for money at a club called the Carousel on Jericho Turnpike in Huntington Station.
Though just 18, she had already worked at three other strip clubs. She didn't dance every night, only when she needed money. Most days, she worked as a babysitter. Sweet and soft-spoken, she had grown up taking care of children. But babysitting brought in just enough to cover the rent for her room in a boardinghouse on West 11th Street in Huntington Station. She danced for everything else.
The job application at the Carousel didn't ask her age. It asked her measurements, favorite drink and favorite music. She wasn't much of a drinker, but she wrote down a Cosmo. She put rhythm and blues as her favorite music. And she used her real name, Cheeoma Joseph.
In the month she had worked there, she had made at least $100 a night and sometimes much more, enough to buy diamond earrings and a Movado watch. She was saving for a car. She already had her GED, and she had plans. Dancing was the way to make those plans happen. Until March 3, 2001.
That night is chronicled in police and court records. Despite the careful and bureaucratic language of the records (Suffolk police declined to comment), the searing drama of Joseph's last night at the Carousel is clear.
"I don't like that people feel sorry," Joseph said. "It happened."
That night had seemed like any other, she recalled. She arrived, as usual, around 8, changed and got ready for her first dance.
The Carousel dance floor is narrow and set in the middle of a rectangular bar. Customers sit at stools around it. The music is loud, and flashing black lights can make a dancer's white thong appear to glow. Other dancers sometimes offered customers $25 lap dances. But Joseph said she preferred sitting in a corner between dances.
Around 3:15 a.m., another of the dancers left for the night, according to police records. As she pulled out of the parking lot, she noticed a black Honda parked with its lights on. The Honda started following her. She headed west and made a quick U-turn. The other driver did the same and tried to cut her off, but she sped south on Route 110 and pulled into the parking lot of a Dunkin' Donuts.
The driver whipped in front of her, his engine facing hers. A man wearing dark wraparound sunglasses and dark clothing stepped out. She could see an identification card hanging from his neck and handcuffs hooked onto his belt.
Terrified, she backed up. Seeing two men in a car in the parking lot, she screamed for help. With their car escorting her, she drove to the Northern State Parkway. She never saw where the man with the ID went.
Back at the Carousel, Joseph was the last dancer of the night. She called a cab, as usual. When the driver pulled up around 4:30 a.m., she didn't recognize him. His name was Arthur McNeil.
As Joseph slid into the cab, she noticed a dark car across the street with its headlights on. She knew nothing of the earlier incident, but she feltwary. The car followed them. "I kept on looking back," she recalled. When she saw the car turn off, she felt relieved.
McNeil stopped in front of her rooming house. Joseph saw the car again. It was a black Honda. A man, tall and lean, got out and walked toward them. McNeil rolled down his window. The man was wearing dark clothing and had an ID card on a chain around his neck. Just as Joseph glanced at his handcuffs, he pointed a black flashlight in her eyes.
"He told me he was from the FBI and that the Carousel was under surveillance for narcotics," Joseph recalled. "I told him I didn't know anything about that."
She thought he seemed shaky. "He didn't seem for real."
She told him to get the light out of her face. He didn't move. She lunged forward and grabbed the flashlight and locked her door. Unglued, he screamed for her to give back the flashlight.
"I don't know this guy!" she yelled to the driver.
McNeil said nothing. He didn't move.
The man grabbed the door handle, frantically trying to open it. Joseph wavered. "I thought he might really be an FBI agent. I gave him back the flashlight," she said.
Then he pulled out a gun.
He demanded her purse. Before Joseph could move, he shot McNeil in the neck. Then he pointed the gun at her and fired three times. The bullets ricocheted through her body.
He demanded her bag again. Faint and in searing pain, she threw her Nine West pocketbook with her wallet and ID at him. Then she gasped, "I'm dead," according to records.
Without another word, the man got into his car and drove away.
Bleeding profusely, Joseph asked McNeil if he was all right. He didn't answer.
She tried to open the door of the cab but could not move her legs. She tried to blow the car horn, but it didn't work. She summoned all her strength and pulled herself over the front seat to radio for help.
"I said, 'Help! I've been shot! The cabdriver's dead!"
Joseph kept screaming for help. She had grown up in the neighborhood and thought someone was bound to hear her. Her aunt did. But she didn't know it was Cheeoma and didn't respond.
Within minutes, Suffolk County police and an ambulance got to the scene and rushed Joseph to Huntington Hospital. She drifted in and out of consciousness, thinking she was going to die.
Police called her mother, Maria Wyatt.
Wyatt had learned of her daughter's dancing only a week earlier. Wyatt had tried gently to talk her out of it, and Joseph had cried.
"I left by saying, 'If you wanna talk, call me.' That whole week she didn't call me, so I knew she had made her decision," Wyatt recalled.
After she hung up with the police, Wyatt immediately called her pastor, the Rev. Janine Burns. It was around 5 a.m.
Burns, of Huntington Station, was asleep and didn't hear the phone. Wyatt left a message: "Rev. Janine, I'm doing what you taught me to do. I'm putting God first. I'm going to Huntington Hospital. Cheeoma's been shot."
Burns is an interfaith minister. Since childhood, she has been committed to helping others but felt disenchanted with formal religion, she said. During a painful illness, she turned to spiritual readings for solace. She said she felt greatly helped by those affirmations and started her own church, the New Thought Spiritual Center, in a small storefront on West Hills Road in Huntington Station. Wyatt had brought her daughter along since the girl was 10.
According to records, a doctor at the hospital gave police a copper hollow-pointed bullet he had removed from Joseph's liver. He left behind a bullet that was lodged near her spinal cord. Doctors said to remove it would be to risk total paralysis.
At 6 a.m., the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office declared Arthur McNeil dead.
McNeil, 53, was originally from Hornby, S.C. The child of sharecroppers, he had moved to Long Island 10 years earlier. In his spare time, he loved fixing cars, according to his family.
At the hospital, police stood guard at Joseph's bed. She could describe the shooter, but she couldn't feel her legs.
Burns arrived and prayed with Joseph, who had wounds in her chest, back and under her left arm. She had surgery to drain fluid from her lung.
Suffolk homicide detectives fanned out. They interviewed other tenants of Joseph's rooming house, friends and dancers. The manager of the Carousel, according to records, didn't know much.
A week later, social worker Brenda Valdes was headed home to Centereach from a romantic night out with her boyfriend, who was asleep in the passenger seat.
As she passed exit 47 on the Long Island Expressway, a car with high beams on came right up behind her. Before she could try to do anything, the car, a black Honda, pulled up beside her. She looked and saw a man pointing a gun at her.
Suddenly, she saw a flare and heard three loud pops. The last bullet hit her side window.
"Omigod!" she yelled to her boyfriend. "We've been shot."
The other driver sped up and drove off. Valdes pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. "My God!" she screamed. "Why did he do that?"
Her boyfriend called 911 on his cell phone. It was 4:48 a.m.
Suffolk Police Officer Jesus Faya got the call and, hoping to catch the shooter, drove onto the median near exit 55 and waited. But the black Honda didn't come by.
Valdes and her boyfriend, fearful of being shot at again, went to the police station. There they learned of the shootings a week earlier.
Back at the Carousel that early morning, things were tense. One dancer asked a bouncer to follow her home. A black Honda started following them, and they pulled their cars over to the side of Cuba Hill Road in Huntington. The driver fired at them twice. The bouncer, Gregory Anziano, jumped out and got the dancer into his car. He memorized the shooter's plate and then headed straight to the second precinct in Huntington, according to records.
At 5:11 a.m., Suffolk Police Officer David Cotler spotted a black Honda headed west on Jericho Turnpike and making a left onto Route 110. The officer turned on his siren and lights, but the Honda sped up. It was going 80 mph the wrong way down Route 110.
A few minutes later, Suffolk Police Officer Kurt Lempe, who had ridden in the ambulance with Joseph, and Faya joined the chase. Faya tried to box in the Honda and then pulled even with it. The driver pointed a black pistol at him.
Faya braked hard, fell in behind the Honda and bumped its rear side bumper. The Honda started to fishtail, and Faya rammed it. Another officer pulled his car in front of the Honda to block it. Within moments, Faya himself was boxed in, surrounded by other police cars. "But I held the suspect at gunpoint until eventually he relented and raised both empty hands," Faya said in his report.
Police officers told the driver to get out of the car. He just stared at them. They broke the passenger window and pulled him out. They patted him down and found a magazine clip, a black flashlight and a pair of handcuffs.
As they walked him to the patrol car, the driver said, "What's this about? Is this about Cheeoma? Yeah, I shot Cheeoma, but the cabbie, he's a question mark."
Joseph was still in the hospital, still under guard and still unable to move her legs.
At the scene of the arrest, police searched the Honda. They found a black ski mask, a laptop computer, a 9mm Ruger handgun, 74 rounds of ammunition, various IDs and a copy of the Newsday story about the murder of McNeil and the shooting of Joseph.
After spending six weeks in Huntington Hospital, Joseph was transferred to the Rusk Institute in Manhattan for 12 more weeks of rehabilitation in the pediatric ward. She was paralyzed from the waist down.
"We see the worst things that people do to each other," Dr. Jacob Neufeld, her doctor, said at the time, "and we see the worst things they do to children."
Ten years ago, before managed care, a patient with Joseph's type of spinal cord injury would have spent up to a year at Rusk, Neufeld said. "She's climbing a hill, and the hill has peaks and valleys."
At Rusk, she spent her days in physical and occupational therapy and ignoring the attentions of another patient, a 12-year-old boy whose leg had been crushed by a van. Patients there, who were clearly fond of their therapists, joked about the "torture sessions." For Joseph, just trying to hold herself up on crutches caused stabbing spasms of pain.
She didn't cry, but she felt restless. She left Rusk in a wheelchair and moved to her mother's home in Amityville just before the Fourth of July.
Unable to work or go out the way she had before, Joseph treated herself to two tattoos: "No Mo' Pain" on her right arm and "No Mo' Drama" on her left. The words are from a song by one of her favorite singers, Mary J. Blige.
Getting to physical therapy regularly was difficult because she needed someone to drive her. But Joseph is strong and has seen slow, but steady, progress.
Now she can walk with crutches and moves haltingly around her tiny apartment in Amityville, grabbing walls and the edges of countertops.
Family and friends help her with chores most people take for granted, such as shopping for groceries and going to the Laundromat. But she handles as much as she can - even rearranging her furniture - on her own.
"I'm used to it," she said quietly. "This is my life now."
For Valdes, everything changed after the shooting. For months afterward, she said, she couldn't bring herself to drive. She was afraid to leave home at night. And the fear extended to work, where she helps find housing for, among others, inmates coming out of prison. "My sense of security was destroyed," she said.
The sting was worsened, she said, when police told her the shooter said she was just "target practice."
The tension spilled over into her relationship with her boyfriend, which eventually ended. She sought counseling, spent time with her family and prayed. "I had to fight to get my life back," she said.
Just what motivated the shooter eludes her. "He didn't know me. He didn't know who I was. I was just an invisible person he played with," she said.
The man responsible did not know any of his victims.
The shooter was Michael Taffinder, then 31, of Belle Harbor. He had no previous criminal convictions. Yet he committed what Assistant District Attorney Janet Albertson called "some of the most egregious crimes Suffolk County has ever seen."
At his sentencing, on Feb. 28, 2002, Taffinder pleaded guilty to charges of murder, attempted murder and other related charges. "He knows he deserves punishment," his court-appointed lawyer, Alan Polsky, said at the time.
No one from his family attended the sentencing.
As Albertson ticked off the litany of his crimes - one murdered, one maimed, others traumatized - Taffinder smirked. He continued to smirk, even as members of cabdriver McNeil's family muttered angrily. He seemed entirely unaffected, until Valdes addressed the court.
"I want you to see my face," she told him. "You didn't know me. I'm not an animal. I'm a person. I am loved."
Taffinder turned to look at her. "That night you took something away from me," Valdes continued. "You took away my faith in the human spirit."
The smirk faded.
"I know the Bible says you forgive, but I don't forgive you," Valdes said.
Taffinder declined to address the court.
Acting Supreme Court Justice Michael Mullen sentenced him to 30 years to life and quoted Taffinder's description of killing as a "power trip."
"He feels like God," Mullen said. "That's disturbing."
Incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility for the past year, Taffinder has started writing a novel. "Each and every inmate has to soul-search to find their own ways to adjust to prison," he said in a letter in response to a reporter's questions.
He said "the incident" is not easy to talk about.
Prior to the shootings, Taffinder wrote, he had become addicted to Manhattan's trendy club scene and to drugs and alcohol as well. He liked looking good, favoring designers Kenneth Cole and Dolce & Gabbana. "It's funny," he said, "people used to tell me I had a John Gotti wardrobe."
His life spun out of control, he said, and he enrolled in a drug-treatment program. "But it just wasn't working for me. I kept on using and abusing drugs and alcohol."
Taffinder has offered no explanation or apology for the shootings. As a child, he said, he was hyperactive and had a "tenacious temper." After his arrest, he said, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is manifested by mood swings and impulsive behavior. He is being treated with a combination of medications that he said was helping him.
"Michael," attorney Polsky said, "is not beyond redemption."
Joseph said she never thinks about Taffinder. She occasionally has nightmares about guns, though never about that night.
She still loves music, but she isn't comfortable going to concerts. Besides, she has other responsibilities now: her 6-month-old son, Thomas Paul Joseph, who smiles easily and often. The father is an old boyfriend whom Joseph has long considered her best friend. They are not likely to marry, she said.
Making ends meet is not easy. Social Security payments of $600 a month don't cover her $900-a-month rent, not to mention food and diapers for the baby. "The only thing that's bad is keeping up with the bills," she said.
Joseph would like to get married and be a housewife. "I want to have a house, have my friends. I'll be happy."
She no longer dreams of performing. Dancing, for her, was glamorous, a way to feel more grown-up. But it quickly became a job. She hated pretending to like the men who watched her. "I feel that I'm in a better situation now," she said.
She and the baby share a small, feminine bedroom with a canopy bed, fluffy comforter, stuffed animals and a huge poster of NBA star Allen Iverson. Like other new mothers, her schedule is arranged around her baby's needs.
Joseph's commitment to her faith has become deeper now, she said. She says affirmations daily, and now she means them. "I feel that God takes care of me," she said quietly.
Asked if she has any regrets, she answered, "Not at all."
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-p2cover3293368may21,0,2987232.story?coll=ny-homepage-right-area
Cheeoma Joseph had finished her shift as a topless dancer and was headed home. She was stalked and shot. She was 18.
Email this story
Printer friendly format
Photos
Cheeoma Joseph (Newsday/Ken Spencer)
Michael Taffinder (Suffolk County Police Photo)
The Carousel Club in Huntington Station (Newsday/Ken Spencer)
Special Section
Full Coverage: Shooter Stalked Nightclub Dancers
Top Stories
Hempstead Redraws Lines Over Protests
Coalition Formed To Push For More Openness on Plum Island Safety
Great Neck Eye Doctor Pleads Guilty To Medicare Fraud
Looking Beyond County
Cops Usher In Hurry-up Baby
By Sandra Peddie
STAFF WRITER
May 21, 2003
They called her Heaven. Long-limbed, with almond- shaped eyes and a sleek body, she danced for men for money at a club called the Carousel on Jericho Turnpike in Huntington Station.
Though just 18, she had already worked at three other strip clubs. She didn't dance every night, only when she needed money. Most days, she worked as a babysitter. Sweet and soft-spoken, she had grown up taking care of children. But babysitting brought in just enough to cover the rent for her room in a boardinghouse on West 11th Street in Huntington Station. She danced for everything else.
The job application at the Carousel didn't ask her age. It asked her measurements, favorite drink and favorite music. She wasn't much of a drinker, but she wrote down a Cosmo. She put rhythm and blues as her favorite music. And she used her real name, Cheeoma Joseph.
In the month she had worked there, she had made at least $100 a night and sometimes much more, enough to buy diamond earrings and a Movado watch. She was saving for a car. She already had her GED, and she had plans. Dancing was the way to make those plans happen. Until March 3, 2001.
That night is chronicled in police and court records. Despite the careful and bureaucratic language of the records (Suffolk police declined to comment), the searing drama of Joseph's last night at the Carousel is clear.
"I don't like that people feel sorry," Joseph said. "It happened."
That night had seemed like any other, she recalled. She arrived, as usual, around 8, changed and got ready for her first dance.
The Carousel dance floor is narrow and set in the middle of a rectangular bar. Customers sit at stools around it. The music is loud, and flashing black lights can make a dancer's white thong appear to glow. Other dancers sometimes offered customers $25 lap dances. But Joseph said she preferred sitting in a corner between dances.
Around 3:15 a.m., another of the dancers left for the night, according to police records. As she pulled out of the parking lot, she noticed a black Honda parked with its lights on. The Honda started following her. She headed west and made a quick U-turn. The other driver did the same and tried to cut her off, but she sped south on Route 110 and pulled into the parking lot of a Dunkin' Donuts.
The driver whipped in front of her, his engine facing hers. A man wearing dark wraparound sunglasses and dark clothing stepped out. She could see an identification card hanging from his neck and handcuffs hooked onto his belt.
Terrified, she backed up. Seeing two men in a car in the parking lot, she screamed for help. With their car escorting her, she drove to the Northern State Parkway. She never saw where the man with the ID went.
Back at the Carousel, Joseph was the last dancer of the night. She called a cab, as usual. When the driver pulled up around 4:30 a.m., she didn't recognize him. His name was Arthur McNeil.
As Joseph slid into the cab, she noticed a dark car across the street with its headlights on. She knew nothing of the earlier incident, but she feltwary. The car followed them. "I kept on looking back," she recalled. When she saw the car turn off, she felt relieved.
McNeil stopped in front of her rooming house. Joseph saw the car again. It was a black Honda. A man, tall and lean, got out and walked toward them. McNeil rolled down his window. The man was wearing dark clothing and had an ID card on a chain around his neck. Just as Joseph glanced at his handcuffs, he pointed a black flashlight in her eyes.
"He told me he was from the FBI and that the Carousel was under surveillance for narcotics," Joseph recalled. "I told him I didn't know anything about that."
She thought he seemed shaky. "He didn't seem for real."
She told him to get the light out of her face. He didn't move. She lunged forward and grabbed the flashlight and locked her door. Unglued, he screamed for her to give back the flashlight.
"I don't know this guy!" she yelled to the driver.
McNeil said nothing. He didn't move.
The man grabbed the door handle, frantically trying to open it. Joseph wavered. "I thought he might really be an FBI agent. I gave him back the flashlight," she said.
Then he pulled out a gun.
He demanded her purse. Before Joseph could move, he shot McNeil in the neck. Then he pointed the gun at her and fired three times. The bullets ricocheted through her body.
He demanded her bag again. Faint and in searing pain, she threw her Nine West pocketbook with her wallet and ID at him. Then she gasped, "I'm dead," according to records.
Without another word, the man got into his car and drove away.
Bleeding profusely, Joseph asked McNeil if he was all right. He didn't answer.
She tried to open the door of the cab but could not move her legs. She tried to blow the car horn, but it didn't work. She summoned all her strength and pulled herself over the front seat to radio for help.
"I said, 'Help! I've been shot! The cabdriver's dead!"
Joseph kept screaming for help. She had grown up in the neighborhood and thought someone was bound to hear her. Her aunt did. But she didn't know it was Cheeoma and didn't respond.
Within minutes, Suffolk County police and an ambulance got to the scene and rushed Joseph to Huntington Hospital. She drifted in and out of consciousness, thinking she was going to die.
Police called her mother, Maria Wyatt.
Wyatt had learned of her daughter's dancing only a week earlier. Wyatt had tried gently to talk her out of it, and Joseph had cried.
"I left by saying, 'If you wanna talk, call me.' That whole week she didn't call me, so I knew she had made her decision," Wyatt recalled.
After she hung up with the police, Wyatt immediately called her pastor, the Rev. Janine Burns. It was around 5 a.m.
Burns, of Huntington Station, was asleep and didn't hear the phone. Wyatt left a message: "Rev. Janine, I'm doing what you taught me to do. I'm putting God first. I'm going to Huntington Hospital. Cheeoma's been shot."
Burns is an interfaith minister. Since childhood, she has been committed to helping others but felt disenchanted with formal religion, she said. During a painful illness, she turned to spiritual readings for solace. She said she felt greatly helped by those affirmations and started her own church, the New Thought Spiritual Center, in a small storefront on West Hills Road in Huntington Station. Wyatt had brought her daughter along since the girl was 10.
According to records, a doctor at the hospital gave police a copper hollow-pointed bullet he had removed from Joseph's liver. He left behind a bullet that was lodged near her spinal cord. Doctors said to remove it would be to risk total paralysis.
At 6 a.m., the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office declared Arthur McNeil dead.
McNeil, 53, was originally from Hornby, S.C. The child of sharecroppers, he had moved to Long Island 10 years earlier. In his spare time, he loved fixing cars, according to his family.
At the hospital, police stood guard at Joseph's bed. She could describe the shooter, but she couldn't feel her legs.
Burns arrived and prayed with Joseph, who had wounds in her chest, back and under her left arm. She had surgery to drain fluid from her lung.
Suffolk homicide detectives fanned out. They interviewed other tenants of Joseph's rooming house, friends and dancers. The manager of the Carousel, according to records, didn't know much.
A week later, social worker Brenda Valdes was headed home to Centereach from a romantic night out with her boyfriend, who was asleep in the passenger seat.
As she passed exit 47 on the Long Island Expressway, a car with high beams on came right up behind her. Before she could try to do anything, the car, a black Honda, pulled up beside her. She looked and saw a man pointing a gun at her.
Suddenly, she saw a flare and heard three loud pops. The last bullet hit her side window.
"Omigod!" she yelled to her boyfriend. "We've been shot."
The other driver sped up and drove off. Valdes pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. "My God!" she screamed. "Why did he do that?"
Her boyfriend called 911 on his cell phone. It was 4:48 a.m.
Suffolk Police Officer Jesus Faya got the call and, hoping to catch the shooter, drove onto the median near exit 55 and waited. But the black Honda didn't come by.
Valdes and her boyfriend, fearful of being shot at again, went to the police station. There they learned of the shootings a week earlier.
Back at the Carousel that early morning, things were tense. One dancer asked a bouncer to follow her home. A black Honda started following them, and they pulled their cars over to the side of Cuba Hill Road in Huntington. The driver fired at them twice. The bouncer, Gregory Anziano, jumped out and got the dancer into his car. He memorized the shooter's plate and then headed straight to the second precinct in Huntington, according to records.
At 5:11 a.m., Suffolk Police Officer David Cotler spotted a black Honda headed west on Jericho Turnpike and making a left onto Route 110. The officer turned on his siren and lights, but the Honda sped up. It was going 80 mph the wrong way down Route 110.
A few minutes later, Suffolk Police Officer Kurt Lempe, who had ridden in the ambulance with Joseph, and Faya joined the chase. Faya tried to box in the Honda and then pulled even with it. The driver pointed a black pistol at him.
Faya braked hard, fell in behind the Honda and bumped its rear side bumper. The Honda started to fishtail, and Faya rammed it. Another officer pulled his car in front of the Honda to block it. Within moments, Faya himself was boxed in, surrounded by other police cars. "But I held the suspect at gunpoint until eventually he relented and raised both empty hands," Faya said in his report.
Police officers told the driver to get out of the car. He just stared at them. They broke the passenger window and pulled him out. They patted him down and found a magazine clip, a black flashlight and a pair of handcuffs.
As they walked him to the patrol car, the driver said, "What's this about? Is this about Cheeoma? Yeah, I shot Cheeoma, but the cabbie, he's a question mark."
Joseph was still in the hospital, still under guard and still unable to move her legs.
At the scene of the arrest, police searched the Honda. They found a black ski mask, a laptop computer, a 9mm Ruger handgun, 74 rounds of ammunition, various IDs and a copy of the Newsday story about the murder of McNeil and the shooting of Joseph.
After spending six weeks in Huntington Hospital, Joseph was transferred to the Rusk Institute in Manhattan for 12 more weeks of rehabilitation in the pediatric ward. She was paralyzed from the waist down.
"We see the worst things that people do to each other," Dr. Jacob Neufeld, her doctor, said at the time, "and we see the worst things they do to children."
Ten years ago, before managed care, a patient with Joseph's type of spinal cord injury would have spent up to a year at Rusk, Neufeld said. "She's climbing a hill, and the hill has peaks and valleys."
At Rusk, she spent her days in physical and occupational therapy and ignoring the attentions of another patient, a 12-year-old boy whose leg had been crushed by a van. Patients there, who were clearly fond of their therapists, joked about the "torture sessions." For Joseph, just trying to hold herself up on crutches caused stabbing spasms of pain.
She didn't cry, but she felt restless. She left Rusk in a wheelchair and moved to her mother's home in Amityville just before the Fourth of July.
Unable to work or go out the way she had before, Joseph treated herself to two tattoos: "No Mo' Pain" on her right arm and "No Mo' Drama" on her left. The words are from a song by one of her favorite singers, Mary J. Blige.
Getting to physical therapy regularly was difficult because she needed someone to drive her. But Joseph is strong and has seen slow, but steady, progress.
Now she can walk with crutches and moves haltingly around her tiny apartment in Amityville, grabbing walls and the edges of countertops.
Family and friends help her with chores most people take for granted, such as shopping for groceries and going to the Laundromat. But she handles as much as she can - even rearranging her furniture - on her own.
"I'm used to it," she said quietly. "This is my life now."
For Valdes, everything changed after the shooting. For months afterward, she said, she couldn't bring herself to drive. She was afraid to leave home at night. And the fear extended to work, where she helps find housing for, among others, inmates coming out of prison. "My sense of security was destroyed," she said.
The sting was worsened, she said, when police told her the shooter said she was just "target practice."
The tension spilled over into her relationship with her boyfriend, which eventually ended. She sought counseling, spent time with her family and prayed. "I had to fight to get my life back," she said.
Just what motivated the shooter eludes her. "He didn't know me. He didn't know who I was. I was just an invisible person he played with," she said.
The man responsible did not know any of his victims.
The shooter was Michael Taffinder, then 31, of Belle Harbor. He had no previous criminal convictions. Yet he committed what Assistant District Attorney Janet Albertson called "some of the most egregious crimes Suffolk County has ever seen."
At his sentencing, on Feb. 28, 2002, Taffinder pleaded guilty to charges of murder, attempted murder and other related charges. "He knows he deserves punishment," his court-appointed lawyer, Alan Polsky, said at the time.
No one from his family attended the sentencing.
As Albertson ticked off the litany of his crimes - one murdered, one maimed, others traumatized - Taffinder smirked. He continued to smirk, even as members of cabdriver McNeil's family muttered angrily. He seemed entirely unaffected, until Valdes addressed the court.
"I want you to see my face," she told him. "You didn't know me. I'm not an animal. I'm a person. I am loved."
Taffinder turned to look at her. "That night you took something away from me," Valdes continued. "You took away my faith in the human spirit."
The smirk faded.
"I know the Bible says you forgive, but I don't forgive you," Valdes said.
Taffinder declined to address the court.
Acting Supreme Court Justice Michael Mullen sentenced him to 30 years to life and quoted Taffinder's description of killing as a "power trip."
"He feels like God," Mullen said. "That's disturbing."
Incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility for the past year, Taffinder has started writing a novel. "Each and every inmate has to soul-search to find their own ways to adjust to prison," he said in a letter in response to a reporter's questions.
He said "the incident" is not easy to talk about.
Prior to the shootings, Taffinder wrote, he had become addicted to Manhattan's trendy club scene and to drugs and alcohol as well. He liked looking good, favoring designers Kenneth Cole and Dolce & Gabbana. "It's funny," he said, "people used to tell me I had a John Gotti wardrobe."
His life spun out of control, he said, and he enrolled in a drug-treatment program. "But it just wasn't working for me. I kept on using and abusing drugs and alcohol."
Taffinder has offered no explanation or apology for the shootings. As a child, he said, he was hyperactive and had a "tenacious temper." After his arrest, he said, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is manifested by mood swings and impulsive behavior. He is being treated with a combination of medications that he said was helping him.
"Michael," attorney Polsky said, "is not beyond redemption."
Joseph said she never thinks about Taffinder. She occasionally has nightmares about guns, though never about that night.
She still loves music, but she isn't comfortable going to concerts. Besides, she has other responsibilities now: her 6-month-old son, Thomas Paul Joseph, who smiles easily and often. The father is an old boyfriend whom Joseph has long considered her best friend. They are not likely to marry, she said.
Making ends meet is not easy. Social Security payments of $600 a month don't cover her $900-a-month rent, not to mention food and diapers for the baby. "The only thing that's bad is keeping up with the bills," she said.
Joseph would like to get married and be a housewife. "I want to have a house, have my friends. I'll be happy."
She no longer dreams of performing. Dancing, for her, was glamorous, a way to feel more grown-up. But it quickly became a job. She hated pretending to like the men who watched her. "I feel that I'm in a better situation now," she said.
She and the baby share a small, feminine bedroom with a canopy bed, fluffy comforter, stuffed animals and a huge poster of NBA star Allen Iverson. Like other new mothers, her schedule is arranged around her baby's needs.
Joseph's commitment to her faith has become deeper now, she said. She says affirmations daily, and now she means them. "I feel that God takes care of me," she said quietly.
Asked if she has any regrets, she answered, "Not at all."
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