Cops say they erred about ‘homeless’ ID

The commanding officer of the 50th police precinct has apologized this week for having previously misidentified a homeowner from Spuyten Duyvil as a homeless man who had been staying in a wooded area in the neighborhood. 

The case of mistaken identity unfolded over the past couple of weeks, following months of complaints from local residents about a homeless man in their neighborhood. The man had built a shack in a wooded strip of land near the John F. Kennedy campus off Johnson Avenue and was staying there, neighbors said. 

Police visited the area, searching the wooded slope for a shack and its inhabitant, found a rickety structure made of cinder blocks and took a photo of it in late December, officers said. A Press reporter came in a few weeks later and found yet another shack. Besides the smaller cinder-block structure, which was mostly buried under the snow following an early February storm, a second, much larger structure had appeared by mid-February. Next to it, a man was clearing debris. 

At that time, police identified the man as a local resident who owned a house near Fairfield Avenue and W. 227th Street. They said at the time he had left his house to live in the shack, and gave his name as Carlos Gavila. 

And then it turned out the man was not Gavila at all.

“I apologize for this misidentification,” the commanding officer of the 50th precinct, Capt. Terence O’Toole, told The Press on Feb. 27.  

“We were told at numerous meetings — numerous community meetings, numerous times — that Carlos was going into the woods over there and staying in the shack,” O’Toole said. The account proved to be wrong, he said. 

The Press reported the initial police account, claiming the homeless man was Gavila, in the Feb. 16 article “When a house is not a home.” After the article was published, police revisited the wooded area, O’Toole said. Officers found a man at one of the shacks and brought him to the precinct. He told police his name was not Gavila, identifying himself by a different name instead, O’Toole told The Press. Officers took a photo of the man at the precinct house and showed it to residents around Fairfield Avenue and W. 227th Street — and the neighbors said the man in the photo was not the man they knew as Carlos Gavila from the house on W. 227th Street, O’Toole said. 

The house is owned by Gavila and his family, according to city records. A Press journalist visited the house on Feb. 27 and saw through a window a man inside. He came out to talk and identified himself as Carlos Gavila. He was not the man from the police photo. 

Gavila said he felt angered and dismayed at being described as a homeless man—a case of mistaken identity that, he said, has brought him a flurry of derogatory remarks from neighbors. At one point in the conversation, tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke about his anguish over the incident.