NEW YORK (QDAO) – Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced that Goey Charles was sentenced today to 25 years to life in prison for the October 2020 murder of his pregnant girlfriend, 29-year-old Vanessa Pierre. Charles abandoned her body on the side of the Horace Harding Expressway in Bayside.
District Attorney Katz said: “We asked for the maximum sentence because of the brutality of the crime and the defendant’s remorseless discarding of the lifeless body of his girlfriend, the woman who was soon to be the mother of his child. The sentence does not bring Vanessa back, but it achieves justice in her memory.”
Charles, 33, of Rochelle Court in Uniondale, was convicted by a jury on November 14 of murder in the second degree and sentenced today to 25 years to life in prison by Queens Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Holder.
According to the charges and trial testimony:
- On October 23, 2020, at about 2:50 a.m., Charles drove Vanessa Pierre’s white Dodge Challenger to a location near 216-07 Horace Harding Expressway. Pierre was in the front passenger seat.
- At approximately 3:30 a.m., Charles got out of the car and went toward the backseat, where his girlfriend was now sitting.
- At approximately 3:38 a.m., when a light inside the vehicle illuminated, Pierre could be seen moving around.
- At approximately 4:36 a.m., Charles exited the vehicle, dragged Pierre’s lifeless body out of the car and left her on the sidewalk. He got back in and drove away.
- At around 6:00 a.m., an MTA bus driver saw Pierre on the ground. She was unresponsive, a pair of gray sweatpants wrapped around her neck. Emergency responders arrived on the scene and pronounced her dead.
- The medical examiner determined that Pierre died from asphyxia due to compression of the neck.
News by Breaking911
