“You son of a bitch!”
A Manhattan chef who came home last November to discover his fiance’s raped and slashed corpse in his bed cried in court as the murderer was sentenced today to a possible life term — and issued a victim impact letter that was both scorching and heartbreaking.
“She was an angel to me,” Fernando Vargas, 37, wrote of victim Rita Morelli, 36, a beautiful Italian woman here studying art history on a student visa.
Vargas was a chef at Buon Gusto on the Upper East Side and Morelli was a waitress and manager there, as well as a student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
“When we met we fell in love. I was her life, and she was mine,” said Vargas, who wiped tears from his eyes and visibly trembled in the audience of Manhattan Supreme Court as a Spanish translator read his letter aloud at the sentencing of rapist and murderer Bakary Camara, 42.
“Every day when I get home and she is not there I start crying and thinking how I was not there to take care of her and protect her and kill that son of a bitch,” Vargas, who’d been with Morelli almost three years, said in his letter.
“I would bury this son of a bitch for the rest of his life in prison,” he told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who sentenced Camara to a term of 25 years to life in prison, meaning Camara will be 67 when he sees his first parole board and might never see daylight.
And if Camara is ever released, the grieving fiancé told the judge, “I would tattoo on his face, ‘I’m an assassin and a rapist… I don’t know why he did this to her, the son of a bitch,” Vargas added. “He has taken a life full of virtues.”
Camara, a native of Senegal, had once worked security at a downtown clothing store where Morelli was a sales clerk, and had maintained a friendship and become infatuated with her, pursuing her to the East Harlem apartment she shared with Vargas.
Prior to pleading guilty in the midst of jury selection last month, the monster had fought rape charges by claiming he’d only had sex with Morelli’s corpse. He also tried to call what prosecutor Evan Krutoy derided as a “witch doctor” to the stand to argue that he was compelled to kill Morelli by a West African curse of unknown origin.
“He’s the worst victim, along with her parents,” Morelli’s cousin, Giorgio, a New York-based journalist, said of the still-bereft fiancé. “Because he saw the body. He saw her.” The pair had planned to marry this past summer and move to Cancun, said the cousin, who vowed at the hearing to fight Camara ever being paroled.
Morelli’s brother, Giuseppe, 41, flew in from the family home in Pescara, Italy to read the judge a letter written by his father, Bruno.
“She was in love with America,” the father wrote in the letter, which was read aloud in court by an Italian translator. “Now Rita is in the cemetery and all we can do is pray God that he may protect her.”
Camara’s brutality created voids impossible to measure, the prosecutor said at sentencing. “This defendant’s legacy is one of creating emptiness,” he said, describing how in just one of myriad instances Morelli’s former English professor realized, upon speaking with investigators, that her seat in his class had been abandoned forever.
“This defendant’s legacy is creating a vacuum where this woman once was,” the prosecutor said.
The judge had the final word, telling Camara, “Rita did not deserve this. Rita did nothing to bring this on…Mr. Camara, to take a young and promising life in such a brutal way is senseless and inexcusable. I want you to look around you,” he said to Camara, who continued staring down at the defense table, as he did for the entire hearing.
“I want you to look at Rita’s family and I want you to consider the devastation,” the judge said.
Camara and his lawyer, Seema Iyer, declined to speak before he was led away in handcuffs to prison.