Armando Perez' widow, Marianne Perez, as well as other members of the victim's family, are awaiting the results of a second autopsy, which was performed at their request.
A New York City arts and community activist, Perez was founder of the controversial CHARAS Community Center and a decade-long member of Community Board 3 in Manhattan. He died Saturday morning, April 3, as a result of blunt force trauma, an initial autopsy report said.
Perez' death, and the unexplained circumstances surrounding it, have generated speculation and focused renewed attention on his work as an activist, specifically his struggle to keep the beleaguered CHARAS Community Center open. Numerous luminaries from the arts community, including Louis Guzman, Spike Lee, and John Leguizamo, can point to the support they received early on in their careers from Armando Perez at the CHARAS Community Center.
For 20 years, CHARAS has provided holding areas for films, as well as studios and affordable rehearsal/work space for new artists. The city, which owned CHARAS' building, sold it last year to developer Gregg Singer. Perez opposed the sale and worked vigorously to keep control of the former P.S. 64 building
(605 E. 9th St.) on the Lower East Side.
Perez' death shocked his friends and associates, many of whom are openly skeptical about the tragedy and the way it is-or is not-being investigated by authorities. Perez' widow is now working with the CHARAS center to form a new group, "Justice for Armando."
The Perez family has hired civil rights attorney Ron Kuby to assist in a thorough investigation of the matter.
"The family asked if I would help them interact with police and the District Attorney and monitor the investigation to ensure it's proceeding in a diligent fashion," Kuby told Back Stage. Kuby said he had helped the Perez family arrange for their independent pathologist who conducted the second autopsy.
"It's a situation where one group has a long, deep-seated, and, frankly, well-founded mistrust of police," he said. "And the police, as a group, are used to immediate compliance. A lot of what I'm doing is explaining the concerns of one group to the other."
Kuby confirmed that the cause of Armando Perez' death was blunt force trauma. "The manner of death, meaning why and what it was, remains undetermined," Kuby explained. "Our pathologist said that Mr. Perez' injuries are consistent with either a vehicular accident, a beating, or a fall, though such a fall would have to have been from a sufficient height. The most likely scenario is that he was beaten to death. An auto accident is less likely and a fall is very unlikely. I am reasonably certain he was murdered and we want to find out who did it."
In the last year of his life, which was dominated by the struggle to keep CHARAS open, Armando Perez and his staff enlisted the help of numerous artists, including the actress Susan Sarandon, who consistently supported the CHARAS effort. Sarandon attended Mr. Perez' funeral service at Our Lady of Sorrows in Manhattan on Mon., April 5.
That Mr. Perez' funeral service took place in the same church where he was baptized as a boy and received his first communion, is symbolic of his belief in the importance of establishing a permanent sense of comm-
unity.
Others have demonstrated to keep the center open. A group of sympathetic artists, calling themselves Artists Strike for CHARAS, conducted two non-violent but disruptive (sound and glitter) guerrilla strikes at separate Manhattan movie location sets last year in a bid to focus attention on the plight of the community center. Though plausibly unconnected with CHARAS itself, the group supported Perez' concept of cheap rehearsal space, and of helping new artists by giving them a toehold in competitive New York City. Artists Strike maintained that as long as struggling artists were denied essential work space due to the city's closure of CHARAS, a demonstration against a city sanctioned movie location was altogether fitting.
CHARAS supporters say the sale of their building is not actually final, and won't be until the new owner, Gregg Singer, can find new tenants and can meet certain community use requirements for the site. CHARAS spokesperson Susan Howard told Back Stage that her group's demonstrations have thwarted Singer's every effort to show the building to potential tenants. Moreover, CHARAS supporters have demonstrated four times in front of Singer's Murray Hill apartment building and, during a separate two-week period, in front of his Upper West Side office.
On the night he died, Perez had been watching the original "Batman" movie. He stepped outside of his wife's apartment at 34-04 24th Street in Long Island City at 4:00 am for a cigarette. The Perezes were committed to each other, but maintained separate addresses, the widow said, in part because Armando Perez had to live in Manhattan in order to be eligible for community board service. "He was either staying at my place or I was staying at his," she said.
Fifteen minutes later, police knocked on Ms. Perez' door to say her husband had suffered an accident. Perez was found bleeding from a head laceration and his glasses, wallet, cigarettes, and matches were missing.
CHARAS' Susan Howard said that the 911 call was made at 4:09 am, which was "a very short period of time for something to happen."
"It's all happening so fast that I can't believe he'll never come home," Ms. Perez explained. "I still have fried rice in the refrigerator that he brought home that night."
Marianne Perez said her husband was conscious when she helped rush him to the hospital with emergency staff. But, she later told Back Stage, he did not offer any explanation for his injuries and he could only make the most simple requests about relieving his pain.
Ms. Perez has worked in the healthcare field as an admissions clerk and said she had studied anatomy, physiology, and pathology, as well as medical records coding.
"I can talk to doctors and ask them intelligent questions," Ms. Perez said. "I need to be able to do that for my job." Ms. Perez said it appeared that her husband had been hit. "He had a fractured skull and a cerebral hemorrhage," she said. "He came to and he was in the ambulance. I walked up and the doors were open and I could see his back was in pain, terrible pain. He was flat on a stretcher, and he wanted them to release the restraints so he could put his knees up. He said he couldn't breathe, so they gave him oxygen. Then I saw something odd, his shoes. They were brand new, but one sole was hanging by a piece of rubber, and the shoe was all scuffed up. I knew this had been an assault. I believe it was more than one person, it looked like he was beaten with an object-a bat or a tire iron," Ms. Perez added.
"His spleen was lacerated into pieces, and the surgeon said it takes tremendous blunt force to do that.
""Marianne, tell them to take the restraints off, my back is in pain, please, please,'" Ms. Perez recalled her husband saying on the way to the hospital.
Perez died of his injuries a few hours later at the Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens.
Ms. Perez knows the situation is deeply personal for her, but said she believes Gregg Singer is "very suspect."
"Armando stood in his way of making millions," Perez said. "It's hard to say, this could even have been a political hit-he was also a strong advocate of affordable housing on the Lower East Side. He stood in the way of developers with very big plans and he was blocking the gardens from being sold-and Mayor Giuliani is auctioning those off."
Ms. Perez said that all of her husband's hopes and dreams were tied around CHARAS and that he was ready to give his life-if necessary, to go on a hunger strike-if all else failed. Commenting on her plans to continue working with CHARAS and the fact that she has already been invited to assist in developing strategies, Perez said, "I'll do it for him."