As the sun was rising on July 4, 1993, a woman named Mary Boyd walked into a pale blue storefront on an empty street in New Haven, Connecticut. She was a regular at the bodega, and when she stopped by early that holiday morning, she found the lights on and the door open. As she scanned the aisles, she called for the store's owner, Eugenio DeLeon Vega. She used his nickname, Gene, but there was no response. Boyd checked the bathroom, then went outside to look near the garbage cans. By 5:42 a.m., Boyd had given up and, using a phone near the check-out counter, dialed 911.



At 51, DeLeon Vega was a big man with soft features. He was born in Patillas, on Puerto Rico's southeastern coast, and he'd come to Connecticut in his late teens by way of a farmworker job in Florida. After arriving in New Haven, DeLeon Vega became the upwardly mobile immigrant of myth and cliché: He married, had three children, and upgraded from farm work to laboring at a concrete plant to running his own restaurant, then his own bar, then, by the 1970s, his own grocery store. He called it La Casa Green.

DeLeon Vega worked long hours — sunrise to 11 p.m. — and even though he didn't go to high school or college, or read or write in English, he was a shrewd businessman. "You can't cheat him in numbers," recalled one of his daughters, Luz. By appearances alone, you might think he was "the meanest guy in the world," Luz recalled, but actually, he was the opposite — "a people person," she said. Luz used to work with him at the store, and she remembered how the neighborhood's homeless would stop in, their gazes fixed on the prepared foods. "I'd say, 'Can I?' He'd say, 'Yes, you may,'" she said. "They say, 'I'll pay.' And we say, 'Don't.'" Over time, Luz recalled, her father's most successful business became one of the centers of his life. "That was his blood," she said.

Twenty-three minutes after the 911 call, the first officers arrived at La Casa Green. One, a young baby-faced officer named Keith Wortz, also knew DeLeon Vega from the neighborhood, and he, too, called for Gene as he marched up and down the bodega's aisles. Still, there was nothing. In a police report, a detective would later note the ordinariness of place, with its crowded rows of condiments and spices, paper towels and produce. The cash register was loaded with bills and coins. Everything was in perfect order.

Finally, Wortz moved to the back room, where there was a large floor safe — "the kind of safe you'd see in an old gumshoe movie, like in Roger Rabbit," Wortz said in an interview last year. The door was hanging open; a checkbook was spilling out. "Immediately, the hairs are sticking up all over," he said. "I was like, 'Sarge, back here.' I don't want to say too much because someone could be hiding behind something."