Maria Cruz, a 41-year-old Hispanic/Latina woman from Rockaway, New York, went to Newark, New Jersey, in late June 2014 for an underground cockfight held inside a private home on 3rd Avenue in the city’s North Ward. The event drew a crowd of spectators and gamblers into cramped rooms, the sound of birds and side conversations filling a house that was never meant to hold so many people. Amid the noise and movement, Cruz joined others around the improvised pit, unaware that the gathering had attracted not only bettors and handlers, but men who saw the illegal event as an opportunity for something far more dangerous.
Sometime between June 28 and 29, 2014, as the cockfight was underway, three men from Elizabeth and Newark allegedly put into motion a plan to rob the people packed inside the house. According to prosecutors, Samir Thomas, 24, Kelvin Diaz, 31, and Luis Ortiz, 28, conspired to carry out an armed robbery of the attendees.
In the chaos of that attempted holdup, Thomas is accused of firing into the crowd. One of the bullets struck Cruz, turning an already brutal illegal spectacle into a sudden scene of panic and bloodshed. She was rushed from the cockfight to a hospital, but the wound proved fatal, and she died as a result of the gunfire that night.
In the months that followed, investigators and prosecutors worked to reconstruct what had happened inside the 3rd Avenue residence. The picture that emerged was of a clandestine gathering used as cover for a robbery, with Cruz an unarmed attendee caught in the line of fire. By 2016, an Essex County grand jury had indicted all three alleged participants in the robbery plot. Thomas, from Elizabeth, was charged on ten counts, including conspiracy, attempted robbery, felony murder, manslaughter, attempted burglary, and multiple weapons offenses. Diaz, also from Elizabeth, faced seven counts, among them felony murder, attempted robbery, and weapons charges. Ortiz, a Newark resident, was indicted on conspiracy to commit robbery and burglary, along with animal-cruelty charges tied to the cockfighting itself. At the time of the indictments, Diaz was being held at the Essex County Correctional Facility, Thomas was in custody in North Carolina, and Ortiz had been released.
The story of Cruz’s killing did not end with the indictments. In North Carolina, Thomas was later sentenced to between 70 and 96 months in prison on separate felony robbery and weapons charges stemming from crimes committed there, with local authorities describing him as a suspect wanted in the New Jersey cockfight homicide. Court documents and civil filings show that, after those proceedings, he was confined as a state pretrial detainee at the Essex County Correctional Facility, indicating that the New Jersey case remained active and that he was eventually brought back to face the murder indictment tied to Cruz’s death. Public records available to date, however, stop short of clearly documenting the final outcome of those homicide-related charges against Thomas, Diaz, and Ortiz, leaving the legal coda to Cruz’s killing unresolved in the open sources that recount how a night of illicit gambling in Newark ended with her life abruptly taken by a bullet meant for no one in particular.
