Juan Rodriguez, 37, a man from New York City, was dead by the time dawn approached on October 30, 1986—one of four men shot in a Bronx apartment-house attack that unfolded in the deep early hours, around 4 a.m., when gunmen pushed into a run-down building hunting for money and narcotics and the people they believed could lead them to it.
Investigators described the violence as a robbery attempt aimed at cocaine dealers: a burst of intrusion, a demand for access to drugs and cash, and then an “altercation” that ended with four bodies left behind. The victims named in contemporaneous reporting were Angel Castro, Hector Hernandez, Juan Rodriquez, and Jesus Perez—killed, authorities said, after the assailants entered the building with the intent to take money and narcotics, and after at least one target refused to cooperate or direct them to what they wanted.
As the case hardened into charges, prosecutors in the Bronx pointed to two young suspects: Larry Davis and J. Ricardo Burgos. A grand-jury indictment in Bronx Supreme Court tied them to the four October 1986 murders and the attempted-robbery theory behind them, while police also indicated they were looking for two additional men believed to have been involved.
In court history that followed, the murders became part of the wider storm around Davis—already notorious after a later NYPD shootout and manhunt that turned him into a polarizing figure. In March 1988, Davis was acquitted at trial of charges connected to the killings of four Bronx drug dealers, a result echoed in later retrospectives that note he “beat” that quadruple-homicide case even as other prosecutions continued to chase him.
Publicly available sources that are easy to access today make the suspects and the indictment clear, and they make Davis’s acquittal in the four-deaths case clear, but they do not provide a straightforward, complete accounting of final outcomes for every participant—particularly the two additional men police said they were seeking, or the ultimate disposition of Burgos’s murder and attempted-robbery charges in the same level of narrative detail found in reporting about Davis. What remains, in the record that can be pieced together from these materials, is a predawn Bronx robbery attempt that turned into an execution-like loss of four lives, followed by arrests and indictments—and then, at least for Davis, an acquittal that left the deaths without a conviction attached to him.
