After 27 years, trial in teen slay

Aaron Showalter/New York Daily News

Mug shots of Edwin Alcaide who went on trial this week for the 27-year-old murder of Lissette Torres, 19, in Brooklyn.

A grieving Brooklyn family’s decades-long wait to see their loved one’s killer face a jury ended Wednesday when the trial of Edwin Alcaide got underway.

Alcaide, 54, is accused of brutally killing 19-year-old Lissette Torres in Sunset Park, stabbing her 15 times in and around her face in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1987.

“This has been 27 years in the making, almost to the day,” prosecutor Nicole Itkin said in her opening statement in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

She described how Torres was last seen with Alcaide that New Year’s Day; how she spent the night hanging out at his home with her drug dealer boyfriend; and how a cabbie recalled taking her with Alcaide to the local police precinct, where her boyfriend had gone earlier that night.

About an hour after the visit to the precinct, her body was discovered in a nearby parking lot.

“She didn’t go out without a fight,” Itkin said.

Alcaide, a career criminal with a rap sheet that dates back to 1975, was interviewed twice by police, the first time one day after the murder.

He had scratches on his face, which he blamed on a scuffle with a neighborhood rival. But that man said he didn’t know him, the case detective testified.

Still, no one was arrested and there was no break in the case until 2010 when a cold case detective asked the DNA lab to test the victim’s fingernails.

A match came back to Alcaide, who was arrested at a parole meeting in July 2012.

“We waited so long,” said Torres’s sister Lourdes Garcia, 48, one of a handful of relatives seated in the courtroom. “We just hope for justice.”

Defense lawyer Jesse Young did not deliver an opening statement. Questioning a detective, he alluded to two other men who may have been eyed as suspects back in 1987.

Testimony was cut short when the sickly defendant complained about medical issues.

Lizzette Sierra, 46, who was the victim’s best friend, remembered her as a smart and compassionate young woman.

“She had not yet figured out what she wanted to do with her life,” he said. “And she never got a chance.”

oyaniv@nydailynews.com

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