Who killed Dr. Sheikh?
ZMO Law client Alvin Alston was framed by police for the 1987 murder of a Queens doctor. The same police framed Felipe Rodriguez—leading to 27 years in New York State prison for the wrongful conviction, exoneration, and $23.5 million in settlements. Alvin’s case is now pending in Queens Supreme Court: after a nine-year investigation, Alvin has finally moved to vacate his conviction on the basis that the single eyewitness identification was unreliable, he had an alibi that the jury never heard, and he is actually innocent of the murder.
Here is his story.
***
It’s a sunny afternoon in Ridgewood, Queens. Dr. Ali Asghar Sheikh, an Egyptian-born gynecologist, is working in his small, cluttered office on a second-floor storefront on Seneca Avenue. The year is 1987 — Walk Like an Egyptian is topping the Billboard charts. Four years earlier, Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl peaked at number three for five straight weeks. In South Brooklyn, Harlem, and other places throughout the city, old timers play the numbers, a grey market mostly tolerated by the police but run by the mob.
Dr. Sheikh finishes up with a teenage patient in the examining room and comes out to the reception area while the girl, accompanied by her mother, gets dressed. His receptionist, Lourdes Madrid, tells him, “Dr. Sheikh, there is a gentleman here to see you.”
Lourdes had been talking to a man for a few minutes. The fellow was tall and slim and had droopy eyes. He was well-dressed. He appeared to Lourdes to be a light-skinned black man. He was wearing gray slacks with stripes, a white shirt, and had a white jacket draped over his arm. Before Dr. Sheikh came into the reception area, the man entered and paced back and forth. He asked to see Dr. Sheikh.
He told Lourdes several times that it was personal with Dr. Sheikh. She said OK, if it’s personal, I don’t need to know. She handed him a piece of paper and a pencil to write down his name and noticed that he had neatly trimmed fingernails. He asked to see the doctor twice. “When I told him I don’t need to know, I was talking to him, Dr. Sheikh was coming out of the examination room,” Lourdes testified at a trial the following year.
The guy went and stood near the copy machine when Dr. Sheikh came out.
Lourdes testified about what happened next: “He asked me if that was Dr. Shiekh and I said yes. Then he asked me again like mocking me is this Dr. Sheikh? and I said yes, yes, this is Dr. Sheikh. Then I turned to Dr. Sheikh. I said to Dr. Sheikh, this gentleman is here to see you. When I looked at him he had a gun pointed at my face.”
A moment later, Dr. Sheikh was dead, bleeding out on his office floor from a bullet wound to the back of the head. Lourdes looked back and the tall thin man was gone.
She will never forget that moment, how she leaned over Dr. Sheikh and said, please Dr. Sheikh, don’t die.
No one knows who the gunman was.
No one knows why the man targeted Dr. Sheikh for death and assassinated him with a single, precise shot after confirming he had the right person.
***
Fast forward 37 years, still in Queens. April 2024. A ZMO Law paralegal named Emily—newly graduated from New York University—carries a sheaf of papers to drop off at Queens Supreme Court. The papers tell a tragic story, how Alvin Alston was systematically framed by 104 Precinct Detective Jack Beisel for the murder of Dr. Sheikh. Alvin Alston was a numbers runner living a world away in Howard Beach. He did not know Dr. Sheikh. He had never met, seen, or spoken to Dr. Sheikh. He had no idea who Dr. Sheikh was.
Beisel did not even pretend to do an investigation. He did not try to find out who wanted Dr. Sheikh dead, who sent the man to identify the doctor and shoot him cleanly in the back of the head.
Instead, Beisel brought Lourdes to a special police unit with drawers and boxes full of photos of people on parole or released from Rikers Island, people who had had some sort of contact with the criminal justice system in New York. One of the pictures was of Alvin (in addition to running numbers, Alvin stood up for himself in the racially charged environment of Howard Beach in the 1980s).
Beisel showed Lourdes at least a thousand pictures, probably more.
She finally picked one late that evening. It was Alvin.
Det. Beisel went on to get a “better quality” picture of Alvin and showed it to Lourdes. That cemented his face in her mind. Lourdes went home, went to bed and was rousted by detectives at 2 a.m. on November 20, now the second day after the shooting. They had brought Alvin from his home across the City in Brooklyn to the precinct in Elmhurst. During the long car ride, police tried to get Alvin talking. He told them he was with his girlfriend and relatives in Howard Beach at the time of the murder. Beisel lied on the paperwork, creating an “exculpatory lie” where none existed that the prosecutors could later use at the trial. He claimed, falsely, that Alvin said he was at the movies with his “uptown girl.” Alvin just doesn’t talk like that.
After bringing Alvin back to the precinct and making Lourdes sit around for five hours in the middle of the night, the police organized a line up. They sat Alvin down next to five bleary-eyed homeless men from a nearby shelter. They made him hold a placard with the number three on it and said to Lourdes: “we are going to ask you three questions.” They made him wear a bulletproof vest. The other men were dressed normally.
That was enough for Lourdes to falsely identify Alvin as the gunman. She repeated the identification at trial.
Nothing else linked Alvin to the crime—no ties to the local Egyptian community, no contact with the medical office or any patient there, no interactions with Dr. Sheikh or his family or his friends or any acquaintance of his. He had an alibi—he was a numbers runner who just finished work and was with his girlfriend and passed friends and family in their tight-knit Howard Beach neighborhood. But the jury never heard that. They heard Beisel’s false story that Alvin claimed to be at the movies with his “uptown girl.” Maybe Beisel was a Billie Joel fan; Alvin wasn’t.
The jury swiftly convicted.
And last month the papers Emily carried telling this story—including an expert report by a John Jay professor showing how the science and psychology of eyewitness testimony has changed in the last 35 years—made their way to Acting Justice Mary Bejarano.
The story is not really over though. Justice Bejarano is waiting to hear from the Queens District Attorney’s Office, the office that agreed to exonerate Felipe Rodriguez in 2019, to see what they have to say. Alvin is living by himself, on parole. He is also waiting for the Queens district attorney’s office, for the wheels of justice to turn, for Judge Bejarano to see the case for what it is and grant his motion to vacate the conviction that cost him most of his life.
Alvin Alston helps celebrate the freedom of his friend Felipe Rodriguez with Ben Notterman, Judge Adam Perlmutter and Zach Margulis-Ohnuma. Felipe and Alvin were framed by the same Queens detectives in the 1980s. Alvin is waiting for his case to proceed through the courts.