The murders that received little public attention mattered to Lt. Sean O’Toole as much as the ones that generated front-page headlines and press conferences.
“If someone gets killed in Manhattan, it’s going to be all over the news,” O’Toole said as he readied for his Thursday walkout, his final day on the force after 43 years.
“The Bronx … we’re kind of used to working without the press or anyone knowing but solving the little cases is just as important,” he added. “That person had family, that person had a mother, a father.”
O’Toole, who spent the last 24 as commander of the Bronx Homicide Unit, turns 63 on Sunday. That’s the mandatory retirement age, though he said he’d keep working if he could.
“I was born in the Bronx, raised in the Bronx,” he pointed out. “My family was born and raised in the Bronx. It got to be personal when I got these cases.
“It carried me through the years — I work for the people of the Bronx because I am a person from the Bronx.”
Robert McGuire was commissioner when O’Toole joined the NYPD in 1980.
In 1999, he took over Bronx Homicide and has since supervised 3,011 investigations, the NYPD said.
Almost immediately, his detectives joined forces with their counterparts in the 40th Precinct after a 3-year-old girl, Iris Turull, was shot dead in Mott Haven by a drive-by gunman aiming for her father.
Even though the dad wouldn’t cooperate with detectives, the gunman, 29-year-old John Lopez, was identified, busted and sentenced to life in prison.
Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said that’s no surprise, noting the Bronx under O’Toole has routinely cleared the most murder cases years in and year out. That’s in part because his detectives learned from him that empathy toward victims’ families builds trust and cooperation, she explained.
“He was a great commander,” Clark said.
But there are unsolved cases that stick in O’Toole’s craw, most recently the November 2020 murders of newborn twins…
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