The Carter G. Woodson Houses on Powell Street in Brownsville is a New York City Housing Authority complex built around 1970 for elderly tenants, home to about 450 people. Kevin Gavin lived there too, on the sixth floor, 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. He was about five feet ten and two hundred pounds, and he had a glass left eye.
On or about November 8, 2015, Myrtle McKinney, eighty-two, who had lived in the complex for more than a decade, was stabbed in the neck with a knife in her apartment. On or about April 30, 2019, Jacolia James, eighty-three, who had lived there even longer and was said to be wary of strangers, was killed in hers; he choked her and stomped on her neck and chest, and her grandson found her. The official cause of death was strangulation. James and one of the other women lived on his floor. On January 14, 2021, Juanita Caballero, seventy-eight, was strangled with a telephone cord while he robbed her. 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. Police already suspected Gavin of the 2019 killing, but for more than five years nothing tied anyone to all three. 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 on January 21, 2021, and in an interview at the 73rd Precinct admitted all three killings on tape. He told detectives he had argued with each woman over money he said she owed him. His accounts put the blame on them: of McKinney he said he had pushed her into a table where a steak knife lay and it had punctured her; of Caballero, that during a struggle a phone cord had wrapped around her neck. Of James he said he had choked her and stomped on her neck three times.
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 the deaths had a chilling effect inside the complex and across Brownsville, where the building's residents had been terrified of a killer living among them. Caballero's family said they would sue the Housing Authority, blaming inadequate security cameras and protection, and the authority later fitted the building with a network of 140 security cameras.
The case took five years to resolve. On April 24, 2026, 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. "These were acts of shocking depravity and cruelty against three elderly women who should have been safe inside their own homes," Gonzalez said, and the sentence ensured "he will spend the rest of his life in prison and never again prey on another vulnerable neighbor."
Three convictions, three named victims, all in one building, all by a man the building trusted to fix things.