A 48-year-old ex-convict who became a counselor for at-risk youth at the Queens public defenders office is back behind bars, accused of killing a man and cutting his body up to dispose of it.
Sheldon Johnson was released from prison last May and made a name for himself speaking about his former time as a leader in the Bloods gang and spending 25 years in prison for attempted murder, The New York Times reported. Last month, he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about his work with Queens Defenders and how he changed his life.
But on Thursday, he was charged with murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon in the death of 44-year-old Collin Small.
Police said he answered to door at Small’s Bronx apartment Tuesday night at about 8:30 p.m. after neighbors called to report hearing gunshots. One neighbor reported hearing a person shout, “Please don’t, I have a family,” sandwiched between four gunshots.
Another neighbor said she saw a man carrying cleaning supplies as he walked in and out of the apartment, but police left after briefly speaking with Johnson, who answered the door, and not seeing anything suspicious, The New York Post reported.
“The guy stood there,” the builsing super, Orlando Medina, said. “They took him out and everything. They looked in the apartment, but they didn’t find anything. They apologized, said somebody called, and they have to come.”
Later, however, they returned — just after Medina said Johnson had told neighbors he was looking for him.
“I went back to the house and a neighbor called and said the guy is looking for me, he wants to talk to me,” he said. “I said, ‘I’m gonna go to him, I’m gonna ask him what he wants, then tell the police what he tells me.’ That was the plan.”
Police arrived again before he did, Medina said.
Medina told the Times his security cameras recorded a man who changed clothes multiple times as he went in and out.
The man wore a dark jacket, khaki pants, and a plain golf cap while pulling a wheeled storage bin on one trip, carried two bags while wearing a light jacket and a fisherman’s hat on another trip, and wore a dark, puffy coat, sunglasses and a long, blond wig on third trip.
“I thought, I don’t know who this man is, but he is coming in and out with a key, like he owns the place,” the superintendent, Orlando Medina, said.
Medina also said he saw Small enter the apartment the night before but never saw him leave.
When officers secured a search warrant for the apartment Wednesday night, they found Small’s torso and feet inside the storage big and his legs, arms, and head in the freezer, WABC reported. He had been shot at least once in the head.
Police have not said how Johnson knew Small or suggested a motive for the murder.
Johnson, then using the alias Thomas Smalls, was convicted of possessing stolen property in 1997. Two years later, he was convicted of attempted murder and robbery and served 25 years until his release last year, the Times said.
Since his release, he began speaking and working in the criminal justice realm. On Rogan’s podcast, he described his past life of drug dealing, guns, and gangs as something he wanted to leave behind, and that he wanted his son to be free from. His son, also named Sheldon Johnson, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in an attack on a Columbia graduate student in 2008, when he was 12.
“My son was growing up hearing stories about my so-called notoriety. I just didn’t want to be that dad,” Johnson told Rogan. “I said to myself, ‘I’ve been doing bad for so long, I’m going to try to do something good.’ If all else fails, I could always go back to doing something bad. But let me try. Let me give it a shot.”
It would appear that something failed.
Queens Defenders declined to comment.
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[Featured image: Sheldon Johnson/WABC screenshot]
