A Staten Island man discovered dead behind a neighborhood pizza was “hissy pissy drunk” on the ground just hours before, according to a neighbor who police say helped transport him there in an office chair.
The victim, identified by sources and neighbors as Julio Morocho, 34, was found splayed out in his driveway early Sunday, constantly asking to be carried to the pizza joint, according to John Young.
“My daughter is a nurse, and she called me, and she said there was a man passed out in the driveway,” said Young, a 61-year-old nurse. “I urged my daughter to go over to him and check.”If you are a nurse, go check his vitals, which she did. You could hear him say, ‘Urrggghhh!’
“You could smell the alcohol. It’s passing through his skin.” He kept saying he just needed help getting up,” Young said. “I could hear the guy saying, ‘Just help me up. Just get me close to the pizza place. I am not hurt.
“When I arrived here, I noticed them heading down the block. He was hissy-pissy drunk.”
Young said two of Morocho’s friends drove him to the restaurant, but police said surveillance video showed Young and another guy putting the deceased man away behind the Port Richmond Avenue pizzeria.
An autopsy is underway, and no one has been charged with the death.
An employee at the pizza business arrived for work at 6:15 a.m. on Sunday and found Morocho’s body on the ground, according to police.
The dead man’s roommate told cops he took “a narcotic in powder form” earlier in the night and left him off outside after finding him “unresponsive” to avoid getting into trouble.
According to law enforcement officials, a security camera video showed two people, including Young, wheeling Morocho to the pizza shortly after 2 a.m.
According to neighbors, Morocho is an Ecuadorian native who has only lately come to the neighborhood, which contains a hiring place for illegal day laborers.
“The guys across the street, the migrants, waiting for workโthey’re all going into this Mexican club here, and then they’ll be sleeping on our lawns in the morning,” said a long-time neighbor.
“We called 911 several times to report that these guys were coming out of this bar or club, whatever they wanted to call it, and were sleeping on our lawns.” There is no enforcement.” No, there is no enforcement.”
According to Mario Buonviaggio, the head of the Port Richmond Shore Alliance, the local municipal association, Morocho’s residence has been “a problematic address on this block.
“A lot of people looking for work, you know, basically hang out here on the corner and around that park across the street,” Bounviaggio told me. “And if they don’t get the day labor or work, they go over to the bodega on the corner and grab their coffee, which may later turn to beer, and then they hang there.”
“But the police have been showing up pretty regularly for the last two years to that address,” he went on to say.
“We have received complaints. There have been numerous complaints. “I’ve personally confronted them about stolen items, loud music, and, you know, breaking into other people’s yards and taking things.”