A man discovered dead in Marcus Garvey Park near 120th Street in Harlem, New York City, at around 2 am on Friday, December 23, has been identified as Dr. Bruce Maurice Henry, a 60-year-old pediatrician from the Bronx.
A suspect identified as Roland Codrington, 35, was arrested on Christmas Eve, and was apprehended while driving Dr. Henry’s 2021 blue Mercedes Benz.
James Essig, Chief of Detectives for the New York Police Department, said that the suspect was a career criminal with several prior arrests. In a three day killing spree, he allegedly stabbed to death a 51-year-old man near Union Square in the East Village in Manhattan on December 19, assaulted a bartender on December 22 at a Lower East Side bar with a baseball bat, and stabbed two patrons who intervened, on the same night that Dr. Henry was killed.
Codrington had taken a walk in the park to “cool off” after the bar fight.
During his walk in the park, he encountered Dr. Henry, and stabbed him after he was enraged by something the doctor said. The police official said Codrington fled the neighborhood, along with his girlfriend, in Dr. Henry’s Mercedes Benz.
It is unclear what the doctor was doing in the middle of the night in the park.
Before his untimely death, a neighbor saw the pediatrician driving his car out of his apartment building garage in the Bronx.
At the Spuyten Duyvil building where Dr. Henry lived, sorrow replaced what would have been a cheerful holiday as neighbors mourned his death.
On Friday, when officers asked workers at his apartment house if he lived at the address, the workers said they had seen him a day before his death.
One of the residents recalled that the doctor was dressed casually as he drove out of the garage the night of his death. The resident also noted that Dr. Henry had been living alone.
“He worked long hours at the hospital, and was always traveling,” the neighbor said.
“There are times he was working at the hospital and he would come in like wee hours and I’ve seen him walk into the garage with his hospital gear and stuff on,” the resident said.
The respected physician was known to be a cheerful and polite man who handed out holiday cards to the workers.
Dr. Henry worked as a pediatric emergency medicine physician in the Bronx and was also affiliated with Children’s Hospital New Orleans and Nyack Hospital. He had been in practice for over 20 years.