The Carter G. Woodson Houses on Powell Street in Brownsville is a New York City Housing Authority complex built around 1970 for elderly tenants. Kevin Gavin lived there too, though the building was designated for seniors, and he made himself useful. He fixed things. He ran errands. Residents paid him small sums for handyman work, and that was how he came to be inside their apartments.
On November 8, 2015, Myrtle McKinney, eighty-two, was found dead in hers. She had been stabbed. In 2019 Jacolia James, eighty-three, was killed in her apartment; prosecutors said he stomped on her neck and chest. On January 14, 2021, Juanita Caballero, seventy-eight, was strangled with a telephone cord. Her son found her the next day lying in the hallway of her apartment, the front door locked, and tried to revive her.
In none of the three cases was there forced entry, and in none did anything obvious seem to be missing. For more than five years the first two deaths were not connected to anyone. What broke the case was a debit card. After Caballero’s death her card was used, and surveillance video showed Gavin using it. He was arrested in January 2021 and, in an interview at the 73rd Precinct, admitted all three killings on tape. He told detectives that he had argued with each woman over money he said she owed him, and of Caballero he said that during a struggle a phone cord had wrapped around her neck.
He was indicted in March 2021, at sixty-six, on one count of first-degree murder and three counts of second-degree murder, and held without bail by Justice Vincent Del Giudice. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said at the time that the deaths had a chilling effect inside the complex and across Brownsville. The Housing Authority later fitted the building with a network of 140 security cameras.
The case took five years to resolve. On April 24, 2026, Kevin Gavin, by then seventy-one, pleaded guilty before Justice Dineen Ann Riviezzo to all four counts in exchange for a promised sentence of thirty years to life. On May 20, 2026 he received it. Gonzalez described the killings as acts of shocking depravity and cruelty against three women who should have been safe in their own homes, and said the sentence ensured he would never again prey on a vulnerable neighbour.
Three convictions, three named victims, all in one building, all by a man the building trusted to fix things. The archive records the count the court accepted.