Jose Gabriel Escarpetta, 38, a man, was working in Manhattan on June 19, 1995, when a stranger closed in with the blunt urgency of a street robbery. In the parking lot near the Avenue of the Americas, the gunman demanded money and, when Escarpetta did not comply, fired three times, leaving him mortally wounded where he’d been earning a living.
In the hours that followed, investigators tried to make sense of why he had been singled out, and early questions even touched on whether his
death might connect to violence that had already brushed his family. That possibility faded as the picture sharpened: police concluded it was a robbery, part of a fast-moving rampage rather than a targeted settling of scores. The shooter slipped away on foot and headed for a nearby building at 138 West 25th Street, vanishing into the city’s vertical corridors as panic and confusion spread outward from the scene.
The suspect identified by authorities was Darnell Collins, a parolee from New Jersey who had already been killing and wounding people across two states over several days. By the time Escarpetta was shot, law enforcement in New York had been alerted that Collins might be in the city, and officers were working leads that placed him in Harlem and elsewhere—efforts that, for a time, came up empty. After Escarpetta’s killing, Collins continued the spree, moving with a mix of desperation and boldness that made the city feel, for a brief stretch, like it had no safe corners.
There was no courtroom reckoning. Two days later, on June 21, 1995, the manhunt ended in New Jersey when police confronted Collins and a chase erupted into a gun battle. He was shot and killed by officers, closing the search but also ensuring there would be no arrest, no trial, and no conviction tied to Escarpetta’s death—only the conclusion, recorded by investigators and repeated in contemporaneous reporting, that Collins was responsible.
Because the suspected killer died in that confrontation, there were no additional named suspects publicly advanced in connection with Escarpetta’s homicide, and no later charges filed against anyone else for his death. What remains is a stark, senseless hinge-point in a wider spree: a working day interrupted, an encounter that lasted moments, and a life ended on a Manhattan sidewalk—remembered now in gun-violence memorial records that place him among the dead of that date.
