Boy Stabbed at Hempstead High School Dies

Jan 20, 06:53 AM

Jan. 20--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.

Michael was taken to Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre, where he was pronounced dead Saturday at 5 a.m., according to police. The other victims were not injured.

"A tragic event like this is senseless," Fleming said, noting that the victims all complied with the robbers' demands without resistance.

The attackers did not approach from the school buildings, which are about 200 yards away from the handball court, police said, and are not suspected to be students.

Hempstead school officials Saturday emphasized the overall safety of the campus while also reinforcing the school's security.

"We have the situation under control," said district superintendent Nathaniel Clay, with increased security patrols starting next week.

The school will offer grief counseling to students, and the district will assist the family with funeral costs, Clay said.

"This was a senseless crime against a very innocent youngster," he said.

Reginald Stroughn, the high school's principal, said that Michael and his friends were in a prohibited part of campus; the handball court was gated off and "in disrepair" for lack of use. Stroughn said the school would immediately replace the chain-link fence around the courts with a 10-foot-tall iron fence, similar to the fence that protects the rest of the campus.

Fleming declined to comment whether the attack was gang-related, but he said the assailants "behaved as a gang of thugs" and the investigation was ongoing.

Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-244-TIPS.

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