This one has stuck with me for over 20 years. This is Kimberly Antonakos.
She was a 20-year-old college student in New York City when, in March of 1995, she was abducted, bound, gagged and then tied to a chair in the basement of a vacant house. Her father was fairly wealthy, and her abductors, on the orders of a man she thought was her friend, were planning to ransom her for $75,000. But the voicemail they allegedly tried to leave for Mr. Antonakos – who would have paid any amount to get his daughter back – was never recorded. Instead, she was left tied up in that freezing basement, with no food or water and nothing to keep her warm, for three days. At that time her captors were growing concerned – she didn’t look so great and they hadn’t gotten any money. So the man who had masterminded her abduction, 23-year-old Joshua Torres – the boyfriend of Kim’s best friend – kissed her forehead and whispered in her ear, “life sucks.” Then he doused her with gasoline and set her on fire.
Kim was an innocent. She had her whole life ahead of her. She was an only child and the apple of her father’s eye. The reason she knew Joshua Torres at all was that she had taken him, his girlfriend, and their child in to live with her in her Brooklyn apartment when they had nowhere else to go.
She ended up being burned alive for her kindness. She was a couple of years younger than I, and when that story broke in New York it haunted me. It still haunts me that she suffered what she did, and for what? Because (according to witness testimony) Joshua Torres really wanted an Infiniti automobile.
(For the record, Torres was ultimately convicted of kidnapping and murder, and sentenced to 58 years to life. The guilty verdict was reached the day before what would have been Kim’s 22nd birthday.)
(Edited for correction: her father didn’t own a restaurant, she worked at one part time. Tommy Antonakos was a computer programmer.)