Desiree Winfield

In the dark hours before dawn on February 3, 1983, gunfire tore through the Hotel Belleclaire on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a ten-story building at Broadway and West 77th Street that in that era housed long-term residents alongside transient guests. Desiree Winfield, 12, a girl, was among the four people who would not survive the morning.

Police accounts described a burst of violence beginning around 4:30 a.m. inside a three-room, seventh-floor apartment, where the hotel’s porter/h ...