Michael Alguera, 15, who died after he was stabbed at a Hempstead High School handball
court. (January 19, 2008)
Boy stabbed at Hempstead High School dies
At 15, Michael Alguera still had the soft, rounded cheeks of a child, even as he stood on the cusp of adulthood.
He loved a good video game session, tossing around a football, and playing handball, his family said.It was on the handball court at Hempstead High School, where Michael was a sophomore, that he was stabbed to death in a robbery on Friday afternoon, according to Nassau police.
"He was such a good boy," his father, Oscar Alguera, said Saturday at the family's Hempstead apartment. "He didn't deserve to die this way."
Relatives and friends flowed in and out of the apartment, hugging the elder Alguera as he stood in the kitchen with a stunned expression. Michael's mother, Clementina, 44, was grieving in another room.
"It was our baby," said Alguera, 40, who works as a contractor. "Nobody wants to lose their kid."Around 3:30 p.m. Friday, Michael was playing handball with a 15-year-old fellow student and another 16-year-old friend when they were ambushed, said Det. Lt. Michael Fleming at a news conference at police headquarters in Mineola Saturday.
From the handball court, the friends saw seven to nine young men, some wearing masks, approach them from the wooded area next to Peninsula Boulevard, Fleming said.
The group of men forced the three teenagers against the handball wall and took their cell phones and an MP3 player, and as the assailants began leaving, one of them stabbed Michael once in the torso with a long knife, Fleming said, before the group fled on foot eastbound on Peninsula Boulevard. There were no arrests as of Saturday evening.
I HOPE THEY CATCH THE SNIVELING COWARDS!
