Former Super Found Guilty in Upper West Side Home Invasion Murder of Maria Hernandez

By Daniel Katzive

On a mild winter Wednesday evening in January 2023, 74-year-old Upper West Sider Maria Hernandez returned to her home on West 83rd Street after attending a matinee performance of “Funny Girl” with her sister, using tickets provided by a nearby senior center.

Less than 5 hours later, Hernandez was found dead in her one-bedroom apartment, the victim of a brutal assault and murder.

On Tuesday, a little over three years later, a Manhattan jury found the man whom police arrested for the crime guilty of second degree murder, two counts of burglary, and one count each of robbery, sexual abuse, and felony murder.

Lashawn Mackey, a former temporary superintendent in Hernandez’s building, was convicted after the jury deliberated for about two-and-a-half days. The 51-year-old is now scheduled to be sentenced on July 14. His conviction on all counts means he could face the rest of his life in state prison.

The five-week trial went considerably more smoothly than the state’s previous effort to convict Mackey. That trial, which began in February, ended in a mistrial after a series of failures by the prosecution to provide the defense adequate disclosure of discovery materials. The prosecution bolstered its bench for this second trial, adding a third senior assistant district attorney to what had been a two-person team in the first proceeding.

Jurors in the case learned that police officers from the 20th Precinct raced to 126 West 83rd Street around 10 p.m. on the evening of January 18, 2023, in response to a frantic 911 call. Maria Hernandez’s sister had gone to check on her after the victim’s daughter was unable to reach her on the phone. The sister reported that Hernandez had been attacked and was unconscious and might be dead. Fearing the attacker might still be in the apartment, the sister had left the unit to call for help.

Officers entered apartment 3K about eight minutes later and found the place ransacked. In the bedroom, the victim’s bound feet were barely visible emerging from a pile of clothing on the floor. Maria Hernandez was tied up, face down, and gagged. They removed the rope and a cloth from her mouth, cleared some space in the room, and were joined by EMTs who began CPR. After about half an hour of extensive efforts by paramedics to revive her, Maria Hernandez was declared dead.

A short time later, officers went with the building’s superintendent to the basement to access footage from security cameras. There, they discovered that the management office had been broken into, and the DVD device which recorded video footage had been removed.

A break in the case came the next morning when a resident on the second floor provided footage from a Ring camera on her door showing two men speaking with a neighbor the evening of the attack. The building’s full-time super identified one of those men as Lashawn Mackey, who had worked as a temporary super in the building the summer before and who had previously served time for an assault conviction, though the jury was not made aware of his criminal history.

The resident to whom Mackey was speaking said that he had made comments and a gesture implying he had taken action to disable the security cameras and to respond to issues he had with the building super who had accused him of stealing tools. Other residents reported seeing men matching the description of those on the Ring camera in the basement near the management office earlier that evening and hearing construction noises at that time.

Detectives found video footage from neighboring buildings showing the two men entering 126 West 83rd Street at around 5:50 p.m. and leaving almost three hours later. When leaving, about an hour after they appeared on the second-floor Ring camera, they had rolling shopping bags and a large garbage bag, which they did not have on the way in.

One of Maria Hernandez’s daughters identified the shopping bags as identical to bags that belonged to her mother and which were no longer in the apartment. On the way to the subway on Broadway, Mackey was seen on video stopping to count out money which he gave to the other man, having also apparently disposed of the garbage bag somewhere else along the way.

Late the following night, police executed a search warrant at the NYCHA apartment in Brooklyn where Mackey lived with his girlfriend and several dogs. There, they found rope of the same type and color as was found binding Hernandez’s hands and feet. They also found nine one hundred dollar bills in Mackey’s wallet. They did not find the bags, Hernandez’s missing wallet or phone, the building’s DVR recorder, or any other property that could be definitively tied to the crimes.

Mackey was brought to the 20th Precinct for questioning and arrested early the next day, about two and a half days after the incident. His apparent accomplice, Terrence Moore, was identified by video squad detectives and arrested a few days later outside the shelter in Brooklyn where he resided. Moore died in custody in early 2025, succumbing to a medical incident in a holding cell while awaiting a court hearing.

An autopsy by the city medical examiner found that Hernandez had been strangled and suffocated. Internal injuries were also found to be consistent with a foreign object having been inserted in her rectum. DNA recovered from underneath one of her fingernails and from the outside rear waistband of her underwear was found to meet thresholds for a match with a sample taken from Mackey.

Mackey’s legal team argued that prosecutors had failed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense did not dispute that Mackey had been in the building during the hours in which the attack occurred but said that detectives had quickly settled on him as their easiest answer to a crime they were under pressure to solve quickly. Investigators did not pursue other leads but instead looked only for evidence to support a conclusion they had already reached, Mackey’s team argued.

The defense pointed out that no witnesses had seen the defendant on the building’s third floor where Hernandez resided. The DNA that was recovered, they argued, could have been transferred to the scene by the numerous police officers who were visible without gloves in body camera footage recorded in the first half hour after her discovery. The crime scene was heavily contaminated, they said, and the gag which was pulled from Hernandez’s mouth was never found by the crime scene investigators.

As for the rope, the defense argued this was not a unique product and could not be proved to be part of the exact same rope found at Mackey’s residence. The shopping bags were also not unique and could not be definitively linked to Hernandez, the defense claimed. The cash which Mackey had in his wallet could also not be tied back to Hernandez, according to the attorneys.

Lastly, the defense pointed out, the prosecution had not explained how Mackey could have gained entry to Hernandez’s apartment, as there were no signs of forced entry. A key which opened her door, which detectives said in their initial complaint that they found in Mackey’s residence, did not make it through the pre-trial review process and jurors did not hear about it.

The defense also sought to highlight missteps during the investigative process. The evidence envelope containing rope found at Mackey’s residence was incorrectly labeled as coming from the crime scene due to either a clerical mistake by a clerk at the 20th Precinct or an error by the detective squad’s supervisor there.It also came out in the trial that, more than a year after the crime, the lead detective on the case from the 20th Precinct had developed a personal friendship with the victim’s sister, a key witness because she had been the first to discover Hernandez’s body.

During its deliberations, the jury sent multiple requests to review testimony and evidence regarding the crime scene, identification of the suspect, the rope and the bags, suggesting that the defense’s efforts to create reasonable doubt might have resonated with at least some jurors. But in the end, the weight of the circumstantial evidence appears to have been overwhelming.

The prosecution was careful to emphasize that the jury did not have to determine what the motive was – only that Mackey had acted intentionally. But evidence did show that he had interacted with Hernandez during his time as super, attempting unsuccessfully to change a lock. Perhaps, the DA’s team suggested, he harbored some resentment from this interaction, or he could have observed that Hernandez kept cash in her apartment.

Maria Hernandez’s family, who had been in attendance every day for the past five weeks as well as for several weeks in the abortive February trial, were visibly overcome by emotion, weeping and embracing as the verdict was delivered.

One of Ms. Hernandez’s three daughters, Lucia Devargas told West Side Rag the family was pleased with the outcome of the trial. “Hopefully, he never sees daylight out of jail so he can’t hurt anyone else,” she said. “The worst part is thinking about all the pain my mother went through,” she said, adding that those thoughts make it difficult to focus on happy memories of her mother. She has not been able to visit West 83rd Street, where her aunt still lives, since the crime.

In a statement provided to West Side Rag after the verdict, District Attorney Alvin Bragg said “the final hours of Ms. Hernandez’s life were utterly horrific, and the manner of her death shocks the conscience. Thanks to the compelling evidence presented by our prosecutors and powerful witness testimony, including from Ms. Hernandez’s family, Mr. Mackey will be held accountable.”

Mackey, who had been attentive throughout the trial, showed little reaction as the verdict was read, watching the jury intently but with no visible facial expression before being handcuffed and led away by court officers.

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