A member of a Queens-based robbery crew has been taken into custody in Georgia on a murder charge, and will be transported to New York for arraignment in the near future. Police believe that Erick Mejia and the crew posed as cops in order to pull off several high-stakes robberies of drug traffickers along the East Coast; they also believe that Mejia used several different torture techniques on the victims, including stuffing a victim's head inside a bag of onions.
Police say that Mejia and the robbery crew would dress up as cops, then conduct a police-style car stop of a drug supplier, brandishing fake badges and using a vehicle outfitted with police lights. In one particular incident, they kidnapped the victim, drove to a trailer home where they tied him up, along with a woman and child, then tortured him with onions: "The crew placed a bag of onions over the head of one of the male victims to induce him to reveal the location of narcotics. The bag filled with cut-up onions caused the victim to experience a form of asphyxiation," said NYPD Detective Therone Eugene of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Redrum Task Force. Another onion-torture home invasion in Georgia yielded 77 pounds of cocaine and $100,000 in cash.
In addition to the onion ploy, the crew also performed "classic" styles of torture, including "beatings, burning with a hot iron, submerging victims heads in water, and squeezing their testicles with pliers." The alleged ringleader of the group is 300-pound Franklin De Vargas, who was responsible for more than 100 robberies in NYC, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.
