Gilgo Beach suspect Rex Heuermann to stand trial shortly after Labor Day
Alleged Gilgo serial killer Rex Heuermann (R) appears for a hearing in front of Judge Tim Mazzei alongside his attorney Michael J. Brown (L) at Suffolk County Court, on Jan. 13, 2026, in Riverhead, New York. Pool via Getty Images
The trial date comes as Heuermann requests to suppress certain evidence and dismiss one of the charges.
Among the statements the defense is trying to exclude is when Heuermann was arrested outside his Midtown Manhattan office in 2023, prosecutors quoted him saying, “What is this about?” and “It’s a mistake.” Prosecutors also quoted him asking the officers and agents, “What did I do?” according to the defense filing.
Also, when court officers reviewed Heuermann’s property after his arrest, he allegedly said of his $6,000 watch, “I guess I won’t be needing that,” according to the court filing.
Defense attorney Danielle Coysh wrote that the statements “were involuntarily made and may not be used in evidence against the defendant.”
The defense is also seeking to suppress evidence seized from Heuermann’s home, office, cars and a rented storage unit, along with DNA evidence. The judge has already denied an attempt by Heuermann to exclude DNA, but now the defense argued the DNA evidence was obtained through an unreasonable search of a Manhattan garbage can, where investigators said they discovered discarded pizza crust that links Heuermann to the murders.
In the same filing, Heuermann’s attorneys are seeking to dismiss the murder charge for the 1993 death of Sandra Costilla.
Prosecutors linked Heuermann to a hair lifted from Costilla’s shirt, but the defense calls that insufficient.
“This evidence, even if accepted as true, does not establish that Mr. Heuermann killed Sandra Costilla, nor that he acted with the intent to cause her death,” Coysh said. “The prosecution presented no eyewitness testimony, surveillance footage, digital evidence, phone records, fingerprint impressions, confession, or murder weapon linking Rex A. Heuermann to this crime.”’
The judge gave the Suffolk County district attorney’s office until March to respond to the defense’s requests.
Stock image of police lights. (Douglas Sacha/Getty Images)
(PHILADELPHIA) — One person is dead and another two remain unaccounted for after a seven-story parking garage under construction in Philadelphia partially collapsed, officials said.
A search and rescue operation is ongoing for the two individuals following Wednesday’s partial collapse, in what Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker called a “complex process” due to the instability of the structure.
“We will not rest until everyone is accounted for from this tragedy,” Parker said at a press briefing late Wednesday.
Three people were rescued from the scene, according to Philadelphia Fire Commissioner Jeffrey Thompson. One was critically injured and died at a hospital, he said. The two others were treated and have since been released, he said.
The incident occurred around 2:17 p.m. Wednesday, according to Parker. A subcontractor was in the process of installing precast concrete floor decking and roof segments at the time, she said.
“After placement, a precast roof segment failed and fell to the level below, literally triggering a progressive collapse of connected sections across all seven levels,” Parker said.
Thompson said engineers and others are evaluating the building so that a safe search and rescue operation can occur.
“We will not stop until we have looked through every part of this affected structure to ensure that everyone is accounted for,” he said, noting that this process will “take time.”
“This building that has been impacted is unstable. It has to be secured,” he said. “We have to very carefully and methodically deconstruct this building for the safety of the people working on it, and ultimately, for the safety of the first responders who will continue the search.”
The owner of the parking garage is the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and the contractor for the project is based in Exton, Pennsylvania, according to Parker.
“We are prioritizing the safety of the construction workers at this time and working closely with the City of Philadelphia and our construction partners,” the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said in a statement.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said his administration offers those on the ground “our full support as they continue rescue efforts at the scene and support the families impacted.”
Eight permits required for the construction were properly issued, and all inspections were up to date, according to Parker.
“The city will investigate this garage collapse thoroughly and efficiently to learn all of the relevant facts of this terrible tragedy,” she said.
A display showing images of Alon, Oren, and Tal Alexander prior to a news conference in New York, Dec. 11, 2024. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Their brand was ultra-lux real estate, and the lifestyle to match.
For more than a decade, brothers Oren and Tal Alexander built a rep of jetsetting glamour and partying at hot spots, flanked always by beautiful women.
What was actually going on behind the scenes, according to federal authorities, was criminal.
Along with a third brother, Alon, Oren and Tal Alexander were arrested in December 2024 on federal sex trafficking charges in a case that has splashed across the nation’s tabloids.
As the brothers prepare to go on trial, the case looms as a battle of he said, she said: whether, as their advocates say, their alleged behavior was simply boys partying hard — or, as authorities allege, something far more sinister.
In a 16-page indictment, the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan says that for well over a decade, the Alexander brothers conspired to “repeatedly and violently drug, sexually assault and rape dozens of women,” using the “promise of luxury experiences, travel and accommodations” as a tool “to lure and entice” and ultimately force sex.
Prosecutors have assembled a chorus of women accusers whose accounts they hope will take a jury through a journey of rendezvous, drugs and booze in places like the Hamptons, Aspen, Las Vegas and the Bahamas.
Some of the accusations date to a time before the #MeToo reckoning. The brothers could face 15 years to life in prison, if convicted on all the federal charges. Oren and Alon also face state charges in Florida. And collectively, the three are staring at dozens of civil lawsuits that remain on hold while the criminal cases proceed.
The brothers’ parents, Orly and Shlomy Alexander, maintain their sons are innocent and insist that that will become clear from the testimony in the criminal case.
“We have been living with this ordeal since allegations first surfaced in civil lawsuits and were widely amplified long before any criminal charges were brought. The impact on our family has been profound and deeply painful,” the parents said in a statement to ABC News. “We believe our sons are innocent, and that if they are judged on the evidence presented at trial — free from speculation or public narrative — the truth will prevail. We ask only for a fair process, grounded in facts, where their voices can finally be heard.”
The sons of Israeli immigrants, Oren, 38, and Tal, 39, forged reputations as star brokers in the cutthroat world of New York luxury real estate, with a portfolio that includes some of the all-time most expensive home sales in the United States. As Oren and Tal in 2022 started their own brokerage, Oren’s twin Alon took a job as president of the family’s security firm.
Promiscuous and privileged though they may have been, the Alexander brothers’ lawyers argue they are not guilty of sexual violence. The men leveraged their success and used it to attract women, who, their lawyers insist, participated willingly. Defense attorneys insist the brothers’ did not commit the crimes they’re charged with and that their accusers’ accounts are dubious and “speculative,” motivated by hopes for windfalls.
“The Alexanders were interested in meeting women, and they met women in virtually any place a man could meet a woman: nightclubs, bars, restaurants, beach parties, pool parties, their own homes, the homes of friends, etc.,” their defense said in a November brief filed with the court.
“None of these women were drugged or raped or anything of the sort,” the defense submitted to US District Judge Valerie Caproni, overseeing the case. “Rather, those who engaged in sex with one or more of the Alexander brothers did so consensually. Years later, they either regretted their voluntary decision or, through communicating with other supposed victims, rewrote history or developed a perspective that was different from reality.”
The brothers’ spokesman, Juda Engelmayer, was more pointed: “Many of these began as late-filed civil claims, not criminal cases, and they surfaced without the objective evidence serious allegations would traditionally produce, no contemporaneous reports, medical documentation, or forensic findings,” he said, noting that the alleged victims did not come forward at the time of the alleged assaults. “At the time, the Alexander brothers were young and navigating adult social environments, but that is not criminal conduct and bears no resemblance to trafficking. These accusations exist only within litigation, where financial recovery is the incentive, not proof.”
Ensemble allegations In their filings, federal prosecutors alleged that the brothers employed a “pattern of behavior” of physical force and “drugged sexual assaults that were the hallmark of the defendants’ conspiracy.”
Prosecutors also point to a series of text message chats between the brothers and their friends about obtaining drugs, including Quaaludes, MDMA, cocaine, GHB and Ambien. The chemicals, federal authorities allege, were “to incapacitate women to further their sex trafficking scheme.”
The Alexanders’ defense challenged the prosecutors’ evidence, including chalking up those conversations as “idle chatter.”
“Even taking the Government’s factual allegations as true (which we do only for the purposes of this motion), there is not a single alleged instance of sex in exchange for something of value,” the defense said in a November filing. “In fact, the statements of the witnesses are precisely the opposite, specifically that they had sex against their will, either because they were drugged, drunk or forced.”
Prosecutors remain confident their case against the brothers is rock solid.
They have notified the court they plan to call seven alleged victims to prove the core of their charges, among them a woman who says she was only 16 years old when the sexual encounter occurred with Alon and Tal, who were 22 and 21 at the time.
Also expected to testify are other alleged victims, some of whom have filed civil lawsuits claiming assault by at least one of the brothers, and may also appear as witnesses in the state criminal case. Though their alleged assaults are not the subject of federal charges, the women may be called as witnesses to what prosecutors say illustrates a history of prior bad acts.
The federal judge has allowed one of the alleged victims in the Florida case to appear as a witness in New York. That woman, known in court papers as “M.G.,” says that in October 2021, she met Oren at a dinner, joined him and others on his boat, and a small group eventually went with him to his Miami home.
M.G. said her conversation with Oren was “flirty,” he gave her a drink, and it turned physical, according to her 2024 interview with a Miami Beach police detective. She alleged that it turned to unwanted and aggressive behavior, and he allegedly ripped her dress off.
When she ran downstairs and tried to open the backyard door, she said it “would not open,” and when she requested to be let out, she later told the detective, he sexually assaulted her with his fingers as she kept saying “no.” M.G. said when she could finally leave, she immediately told her friend what had happened, but that her friend “was pretty drunk.”
In her 2024 police interview, M.G.’s friend said she recalled being told Oren had “tried having sex with [M.G.] after she said no” but didn’t remember being told that Oren had penetrated M.G. in any way. The friend also did not recall the doors being locked when she texted M.G. and they decided to leave.
“I was like, ‘hey, where are you?’ And she said, ‘I think I’m in a room with Oren or something like that.’ And I was like, ‘I’m ready to leave. Let’s — let’s leave.’ And she’s like, ‘yes, please, let’s go.’ And then I just remember walking out of the house,” the friend said. She recalled M.G. seemed “distressed” and had told her “she didn’t want to sleep with him, and he was forcing it.”
In an October 2025 deposition with the Alexanders’ Florida attorneys, the friend reiterated Oren’s alleged advances and M.G.’s objections. But she also said there was nothing unusual about M.G.’s clothing when they left through the front door.
The Alexanders’ attorneys point to what they say are the women’s misaligned memories of the night as evidence the allegations cannot be proven in court.
“M.G’s story is like a C-grade Horror film,” Oren’s Florida defense attorneys Ed O’Donnell IV and Joel Denaro said in a statement to ABC News, adding “her best friend contradicts” several points of the alleged narrative.
“M.G.” did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Other alleged victims in the federal case have offered similar stories of their own alleged assaults, according to court documents.
Two of the alleged victims in the federal case said in June 2009, they were “invited by party promoters to the Hamptons to celebrate Alon and Oren’s birthday.” Though taken to the club on a party bus, the women learned it would not return them to Manhattan.
Alon “told [one of the women] that he had a nice house” where “there would be a fun afterparty, and invited [her] to stay there,” according to court documents. Both women agreed to go to the house. The night allegedly became a blur of what they said were drugged and repeated group rapes by the brothers, though they said they could only be remembered in “flashes of memory” between the two.
Clash of the narratives A critical linchpin in each of the Alexanders’ cases will be the credibility of victims’ narratives, according to legal experts — a hallmark of sex-crimes cases.
“The prosecution of this type of case often comes with a unique set of challenges. As we saw during the prosecution of Sean Combs, consent can be a very complex issue,” said Matt Murphy, a former senior prosecutor in Orange County, Calif., referring to the recent case of hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.
“Jurors often struggle with things like continued contact, friendly text messages, alcohol use, and of course, pending civil suits,” said Murphy, now an ABC News legal contributor. “Prosecutorial success will depend heavily on victim credibility and solid corroboration. We’ll see.”
Some of the women who have come forward with their allegations have said they did so only after learning of others who said they had similar experiences with the brothers.
“Like, handfuls of girls … it was like everyone in Miami knew,” one of the alleged victims in the Florida case, identified in court papers as S.M., told a detective in August 2024, as seen in body-worn camera footage of the interview obtained by ABC News.
“Now I finally feel like, no one’s going to call me a liar ’cause I’m not the only one,” she told the detective.
S.M., who was a model at the time, said she went to an event where the group included Oren in October 2017. Afterward, she said she went with him to his apartment. Once there, she said, he gave her a glass of wine and a virtual reality headset to try, then led her to a bedroom, pushing her onto the bed, where she says he assaulted her as she told him, “no.”
The brothers’ attorneys have stressed that the real-time behavior from some of the alleged victims belies the narrative they have told prosecutors and the public.
The day after that alleged assault, S.M. posted a picture of herself in a bikini on social media with the caption, “Cloudy with a chance of awesome,” according to court filings. That night, the defense said, she went out with friends to a nightclub.
“I always am in a bikini and take pictures in bikinis because I’m a model,” S.M. explained to the defense during a September 2025 deposition in Florida, according to a transcript obtained by ABC News.
Days after her alleged assault, S.M. texted Oren a picture of them, together and smiling, taken at the event, according to court documents.
“You would acknowledge that by you sending him that picture three days later, it would indicate that you in no way thought that he sexually assaulted you back then,” the Alexanders’ Florida defense attorney Edward O’Donnell said during the deposition.
“I feel like I was in some sort of denial,” S.M. said. “I was hoping that it didn’t happen.”
Two weeks after her alleged assault, S.M. met up with Oren again. “I wanted him to make it right because I was — I didn’t want it to be true and I was hurting inside,” S.M. said during her deposition.
Their texts after the alleged assault tell a different story, O’Donnell argued.
“It would be nice to have dinner. Hopefully we can schedule something before you leave,” S.M. texted Oren on Nov. 2, 2017, according to court documents.
“Documented-wise, your actions, your photographs, your downloads, your videoing him, taking photographs of him, you sending him those pictures, all subsequent to you, the date you claim that you were sexually assaulted, all go against that your sex was non-consensual,” O’Donnell said.
S.M. insisted she did not consent to that encounter.
“I don’t have evidence of what happened in that room, but I know what happened in that room and how I chose to act afterwards,” S.M. responded during the deposition. “Whether it be naive or hopeful, doesn’t change that.”
S.M.’s attorney declined to comment to ABC News.
On Jan. 8, a grand jury returned one of several superseding indictments, adding an additional charge against Alon and Oren for allegedly drugging and assaulting a woman during a 2012 Bahamian cruise.
The two brothers had already been charged for allegedly slipping her a drugged drink and taking “turns raping” her; the additional count also charged them with allegedly engaging in sex with her “while she was physically incapable of declining participation.”
In a filing over the weekend, the Alexanders’ attorneys filed a motion to dismiss, arguing, among other things, that prosecutors have repeatedly made last-minute changes to the charges that have left insufficient time for the defense to fully investigate.
In particular, the defense cast doubt on the authenticity of a foreign birth certificate which would establish the alleged age of one of the females involved in some of the activity charged. Prosecutors allege that in 2009, Oren “recorded himself and another person engaging in sexual activity with a incapacitated 17-year-old girl in Manhattan.”
In their latest filing, the defense argued verifying such a birth certificate from a city “in an active war” is near-impossible, and more time is needed given the “central importance of the true birth date.” The judge has not yet weighed in.
The judge has scheduled jury selection to begin on Tuesday. The trial, which is scheduled to start on Jan. 26, is expected to last roughly a month.
Mayor Mamdani speaks at a press conference after a 7-month-old child was fatally shot in Brooklyn, New York, on April 1, 2026. (NYPD)
(NEW YORK) — A 21-year-old will be placed under arrest in his hospital bed on charges he murdered a baby in Brooklyn by a stray bullet, the New York City Police Department said Thursday.
Amare Green allegedly fired shots from the back of a moped into a crowd in Williamsburg that struck and killed 7-month-old Kaori Patterson-Moore and grazed her 2-year-old brother as they sat in a stroller on Wednesday afternoon.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called it a “devastating shooting” and said, “My heart aches for the parents impacted,” at a press conference on Thursday.
Green is a known associate of a street gang operating out of a public housing project in Brooklyn, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenny said. Investigators are looking into whether the baby’s father may have been the intended target as part of a dispute with a rival gang.
New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said detectives have identified the moped driver, but she declined to release a name. The driver is at large.
Tisch mentioned the impending arrest in a crime that shocked the city as she touted a continued drop in crime.
The shooting was reported at about 1:20 p.m. on the corner of Humboldt and Moore streets in the East Williamsburg area, according to police.
Several adults, including two people with strollers, and several other children, were nearby when two males approached the intersection on a moped, Tisch said. The rear passenger on the moped pulled out a gun and fired at least two shots toward the corner, Tisch told reporters, citing surveillance video.
“Today our city suffered a horrifying, senseless tragedy: a 7-month-old child being pushed in a stroller along a busy Brooklyn sidewalk was shot and killed in broad daylight,” the police commissioner said.
The baby was taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
After the shooting, the two suspects collided with an oncoming car about two blocks away, police said. Both men were thrown from the moped. The rear passenger, who fits the description of the shooter, was taken to the hospital and is in police custody, Tisch said.
The other passenger took off, but police later located the moped.
Mamdani called the shooting a “devastating reminder” of the work that remains to be done to combat gun violence.
“A life that had barely begun was taken in an instant,” Mamdani said. “There are no words that can mend the heartbreak this family is feeling now.”
