NYPD detective Ryan Glas was still a 10-year-old boy when a Harlem mother and her special needs daughter were strangled to death in their home in 1994.
The cold case investigator, now 39, helped bring to a close a crime dormant for several years last week with the arrest of murder suspect Larry Atkinson, who was charged with unsolved double murder. Glas would have chosen the case, the first with the unit, on February 9.
“This [caso] It caught my attention in particular since it was a mother and a daughter,” he told the Daily News, adding that the relatives of the victims are shocked by the unexpected capture of Atkinson, who has a long criminal record to his credit. .
The 64-year-old man was charged after his arrest on murder charges in the February 20, 1994 deaths of Sarah Roberts, 57, and her daughter Sharon, 25, inside their residence at Grant Houses on W. 125th St. The two women were found strangled to death inside their bedrooms.
Atkinson, who has 28 prior arrests and five terms in state prison, denied any wrongdoing when he was arrested. Authorities did not provide a motive for the killings or how the subject entered the partially ransacked apartment with no signs of forced entry.
Glas said he initially reviewed the case file at the 26th district police station, where it originated, and found a “very organized” account of the investigation.
“We just go from there,” he said. “I started digging through it. I began to read the interviews that were carried out in 1994”.
During the review, he found some obstacles, quite important: there were no witnesses, no videos about it. Cold case detectives had to rely on evidence collected at the crime scene until they resubmitted the DNA samples in 2022 for fresh perspective.
Thus, evidence linked Atkinson to the murders through fingernail scraping and biological evidence found on Sharon’s hand, police said.
The relatives of the victims were not aware of the renewal of the investigations, Glas said, however, they were pleased with the news of the suspect’s capture.
“They were very puzzled and very grateful,” he said. “They said they were praying for something to come out.”
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