Marleny Cruz (WNBC)
Alice McLeod was Marleny Cruz’s foster mother. (Christopher Sadowski)
TRAGIC:
James Martin, who killed a pal for his Air Jordans in a case that prompted a 1990 Sports Illustrated cover story, is taken into NYPD custody yesterday after his DNA was matched to fingernail scrapings from the corpse of 14-year-old Bronx rape victim Marleny Cruz. (Christopher Sadowski)
(WNBC TV)
(
)
On a winter’s night in 1998, 14-year-old Marleny Cruz struggled in vain against a brutal rapist, scratching him as he strangled her in a deserted Bronx park.
Thirteen years later, the DNA collected from beneath her corpse’s fingernails has led to the arrest in a Pennsylvania prison of James David Martin, a now 40-year-old monster who has served nearly his entire adult life behind bars for a string of crimes — including two other strangulations.
At age 17, Martin had choked the life out of a 15-year-old basketball buddy at his Maryland high school to steal the victim’s $115 Nike Air Jordans, a pair of sneakers that didn’t even fit him.
Fifteen years later, in Allentown, Pa, he strangled his live-in girlfriend, Cecilia Santiago, 30, leaving her body in a shopping- center Dumpster.
Both those murders were solved quickly.
But young Marleny’s death would go unsolved until a Bronx homicide cop retrieved her nail scrapings from evidence storage, allowing the tragic girl to essentially finger her killer from beyond the grave.
Martin was arraigned today in Bronx Criminal Court on murder, rape and sodomy charges.
Prosecutor Rachel Singer told the judge that the fiend made videotaped statements to cops admitting he’d met the girl and arranged for a date at his mother’s apartment.
But at some point, the pair argued, and the thug admitted grabbing the girl around the throat.
“During an argument I grabbed her neck for a few minutes. I didn’t think I hurt her that bad,” Martin said in the statement, according to Singer.
Martin, shackled and clad in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, said “not guilty,” during the proceeding but otherwise remained silent.
He was ordered returned to jail.
His lawyer, Xavier Davidson, said, “Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”
“God made her do that — swipe at him,” Cruz’s foster mother, Alice McLeod, told The Post yesterday, speaking tearfully from the same housing-project kitchen in the borough’s Morrisania neighborhood where the girl once shared family meals.
“She nailed him,” the foster mom said, “so that later they could nail him, too.”
It was Detective Malcolm Reiman of the Bronx Homicide Task Force who cracked the girl’s long-cold case, requesting the DNA profile in September 2011 and — once he got his hit — personally driving Martin from the Somerset Correctional Facility to the 41st Precinct station house.
Martin’s extradition temporarily interrupts the 22- to 40-year sentence he is serving for his girlfriend’s murder.
Back in 1998, cops had feared Marleny’s murder was one in a pattern of several brutal rapes of young females in The Bronx.
Police would not comment on whether they still think so — or whether Martin is now under suspicion for those attacks.
“The detectives never gave up,” McLeod said, lauding Martin’s arrest as an early Mother’s Day present.
“They are my angels,” she said through her tears.
“He just turned 40,” the foster mom said of Martin. “And he already has killed three people. They need to bring the electric chair back and fry him.”
Martin’s first murder, of 15-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas, landed him in a Sports Illustrated cover story on the increasing number of senseless, violent robberies spurred by high-priced, sports-celebrity-endorsed sneakers and clothing.
“I can’t believe it,” Michael Jordan himself was quoted as commenting on the boy’s murder in the May 1990 SI piece. “Choked to death,” the sports legend said, his voice cracking with emotion.
Additional reporting by KENNETH GARGER and JAMIE SCHRAM