Son of Sam victim Donna DiMasi New York PostĬhristine Freund, 26, and John Diel, 30 - a newly engaged couple - were sitting in his Pontiac Firebird in front of the Forest Hills Inn in Queens on Jan. Lomino was left paralyzed but her friend recovered.
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The shooter fired on Donna DeMasi, 16, and her 18-year-old friend, Joanne Lomino, as they walked home from a movie in Queens. He survived but required a metal plate in his head. He was shot once in the head as he was sitting in his red VW in Queens with his girlfriend, Rosemary Keenan, 18, who was not hit. He had long hair and was believed by the shooter to be a girl.
The victim was 20-year-old Carl Denaro of Queens. 23, 1976, the mysterious shooter struck for the second time. The shooting of the two women in the Westchester Heights section of The Bronx initially appeared to police to be random, the kind of off-the-wall violence that was part of the dark side of a declining New York City in the 1970s, and it earned little attention in the press. “I parked around the corner and came out and did it.” Years later, a fellow prisoner would ask Berkowitz how he happened to first target Jody and Donna. Jody later gave police a description of the killer - about 30, white, with curly hair - someone she had never seen in her life. He fired four shots through the closed right window. Donna turned to Jody to ask if she knew who he was.
They had been talking for about 15 minutes when out of nowhere a hulking man in a striped shirt came to within eight feet of the car. Lauria was shot and killed on this street corner in The Bronx by the Son of Sam in 1976. “We both had the same interests in health care.” Jody was in nursing school and Donna was studying to be an EMT. “We were neighborhood buddies,” says Jody. They chided Donna about getting in soon, and asked Jody to come up, but she declined, and the Laurias went inside.īefore calling it a night, the girls chatted about the summer and how they were going to spend it. Outside the building, they had run into Lauria’s parents, who were also just getting home after an evening out, and they exchanged pleasantries.
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Jody had just driven Donna back and they were sitting in her double-parked, two-door, blue Oldsmobile Cutlass with the windows closed in front of the Lauria family’s six-story apartment building at 2860 Buhre Ave., not far from where Valenti lived at 1918 Hutchinson River Parkway. John Travolta, playing Brooklyn dance king Tony Manero, starred in the signature film of the era, “Saturday Night Fever.” The New York City boroughs had become disco central. “Everybody was going to clubs at night and dancing, and no one was afraid to go anywhere.” “Disco was a big to-do back then,” Valenti recalls. The two attractive, dolled-up young women were going to a local dance club. “I do have the application for a gun permit, but I don’t know. “Would I purchase a gun? Would I use a gun?” she has asked herself. my fear of the sound of a gun - fear, fear, fear.”īut, with gun violence rampant across the nation, she now faces deeply emotional questions as the anniversary of Berkowitz’s attack on her with a. I did it to face my fear of a gun, my fear of holding a gun. “Just recently I took a gun class,” she reveals. The mass shootings from Newtown, Conn., to Dallas profoundly impacted her and prompted her to face her biggest fear of all: guns. “It took a long time to be able to deal with the sounds of popping fireworks and stuff like that. “It took probably about six years of my life to be able to get in a car at night,” she says, her voice strong and confident. With this month’s coming 40th anniversary of the start of David Berkowitz’s reign of terror over New York City, Valenti, now 59, has broken her four-decade silence for the first time in an interview with The Post. Valenti was just 19 years old when she was shot by the Son of Sam. Nineteen-year-old nursing student Jody Valenti had just spent a night dancing at a disco in New Rochelle with her friend Donna Lauria, 18, when, back in The Bronx, their car suddenly exploded with gunfire.ĭonna, in training to be a New York City medic, was killed instantly - shot once in the back - and Jody took a bullet in the left thigh and was in agonizing pain and shock.
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