On March 20, Jean Civilne was walking down the block from his home in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx, when four men attacked him and bashed his head with a baseball bat. The reason for the attack: The police don’t know yet.
The homicide went unreported until this week because the police couldn’t identify Civilne, 44. He had no ID on him. The police had to do fingerprints.
The family is perplexed about what happened.
“We don’t know what happened exactly,” Marie Civilne, 59, told the Daily News from her Queens home. “(The hospital) told me a group of people beat him to death. They said he was beaten on his head and he was bleeding. They did surgery but he didn’t make it.
The Police said a gang of four jumped Civilne in the middle of the bustling commercial strip about 3:30 p.m. on Mar. 20. He was struck repeatedly in the back of the head with a baseball bat by one of his assailants.
Medics rushed Civilne to Jacobi Medical Center, where he died three weeks later.
The police on Tuesday arrested 32-year-old Richard Smith, of Highbridge, and charged him with murder, manslaughter, gang assault and marijuana possession. When he was arrested, Smith had multiple plastic baggies of weed on him, court records show.