The Journal

Issue date: 3/22/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Max Gersh A memorial was set up March 15 in front of DeMarco's Pizzeria & Restaurant for 35-year-old bartender Alfredo Romero. David Garvin shot 15 rounds at Romero, fatally wounding him.

GARVIN

On a spring night when many people were enjoying dinner or having drinks, David Garvin fell to his knees amidst a hail of bullets in the middle of a crowded street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Garvin, a Webster University alumnus, was fatally shot multiple times by New York Police Department officers following a brutal showdown that ended in the deaths of a local bartender, two auxiliary cops and himself.


Despite the flood of media coverage preying on Garvin's complex past and depicting him as a monster, one professor from Webster remembers him as a quiet, hard-working student. Garvin graduated from Webster in 1991 from the School of Communications.


Sixteen years later, Garvin was far from Webster and far from the quiet demeanor his friends remembered. Garvin entered DeMarco's Pizzeria & Restaurant at 146 W. Houston St. armed with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a 380 semi-automatic handgun and six magazines containing a total of 90 rounds, according to the NYPD. Police said Garvin, disguised in a fake beard, walked into the pizzeria at approximately 9:30 p.m. brandishing his 9mm pistol. Shortly after Garvin was handed a menu, he fired 15 shots at the back of the bartender, Alfredo Romero, 35, striking him multiple times.


NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said Garvin then left the pizzeria and went out into the bustle of the popular New York street, where he ran into the two auxiliary officers, Yevgeniy "Eugene" Marshalik, 19, and Nicholas T. Pekearo, 28, both unarmed, volunteer cops. They confronted Garvin and commanded him to drop his bag.


"He complied, but then punched the auxiliary officer in the face knocking him to the ground," Kelly said in a press release. "We believe that, while Garvin had extra ammunition on him, his gun was empty from the earlier shooting at the restaurant. That's probably why he struck the officer instead of shooting him."


Garvin fled from the auxiliary officers in the opposite direction but turned back towards them when he spotted NYPD officers approaching. Garvin then turned his attention back to the two unarmed officers who were still in pursuit. He ran towards Pekearo, shooting at him from a distance.


"Garvin fired at Pekearo, first from a car length away, again as he stood over him and another time as Garvin passed by Pekearo, who was laying prone on the sidewalk," Kelly said.


Meanwhile, Marshalik had taken cover, ducking behind a car parked nearby. Garvin ran at Marshalik firing shots at him as he hid behind the car. When Garvin reached the hiding officer, he stood over him and shot him at close range. NYPD reports said two witnesses also saw the brutal killing.


As NYPD pursued Garvin down the street, he attempted to evade them by ducking into shops. Kelly said Garvin went into two local stores, only to re-emerge seconds later with his gun raised at officers positioned amidst the storefronts.


"Civilian witnesses heard police yell 'Police! Don't move! Drop your weapon!'" Kelly said. "Garvin did not comply. He was shot multiple times and died at the scene."


A New York Times photo in the next day's edition showed firefighters hosing blood from the cordoned-off street corner.
A Troubled Past


Although Garvin's aspirations took him to New York City, he was no stranger to St. Louis. Garvin's troubled history had brought him to the area on more than one occasion.


Garvin was born in the St. Louis region Dec. 2, 1964. He attended high school at Parkway South High School in Manchester, Mo., On Garvin's profile on http://www.classmates.com he wrote "…since graduating (from Parkway South High School) I went to Southeast Mo. for three years, dropped out and joined the Marine Corps, got out and finished school at Webster University with a B.A. in Journalism, worked at several papers including the Suburban Journals in St. Louis."


However, later reports disclosed the Suburban Journals could not confirm Garvin's employment.


According to records found by NYPD during a posthumous search of Garvin's apartment, Garvin served in the Marine Corps Reserves from Feb. 28, 1986 to Oct. 24, 1988. Police also said Garvin was dismissed from the Marine Corps with a less than honorable discharge for unsatisfactory performance.


Garvin came to Webster University in the late 1980s and enrolled in the School of Communications.


"I remember him as a non-traditional student," said Don Corrigan, a journalism professor at Webster who had Garvin in some of his classes. "He was older than most of my other students. He was intent on being a good writer. He took it very seriously and really wanted to learn something he could use to get a job."


Corrigan said Garvin never seemed out of the ordinary or troubled.


"He never exhibited any kind of strange behavior when he was at Webster," Corrigan said. "He had been out in the real world and knocked around a little bit. He was a little put off by some of the other students who are at college for the first time and usually on mom and dad's money. He was more serious than other students, but it wasn't excessive."


After graduating from Webster in 1991, Garvin freelanced for several newspapers including the Webster-Kirkwood Times, the newspaper Corrigan co-owns. Garvin left St. Louis and took a job at the Mohave Valley Daily News in Bullhead, Ariz., where he covered municipal and public safety issues from June 1994 to November 1999.


Jim Chaney, who worked at a radio station in Bullhead, said he knew Garvin as an unassuming and friendly person.


"A bunch of media people would go down to the local bowling alley every Friday night to play trivia," Chaney said. "Dave was the kind of guy who would just come in at the end of the bar. We wouldn't even know he came in. His name would just show up on the screen and then we look for him and say 'Hi' and invite him to sit with us."


Chaney recalled a particular incident that happened on a Friday night, one that would prove to be a foreshadowing of Garvin's New York rampage.


While playing trivia, a man signaled Dave over to another table, Chaney said. Then, all of a sudden, the two men were face-to-face, ready to fight. Chaney said no one at his table knew the nature of the confrontation, but the outcome was frightening.


"It was the first time Dave looked like a Marine," Chaney said in a video of himself he posted on YouTube.com. "He looked like he was trained to kill people and break things. When he walked back to the table I told him I didn't think he should mess with the guy. The other guy was bigger and I told Dave he might get his ass kicked. Then Dave looked at me and told me, 'It doesn't matter if he kicks my ass because I'll just fill up a clip and come back and fucking kill him.' It's really haunting now."


Garvin left Bullhead at the end of 1999 and took a job at the Wall Street Journal in New York City as an information graphics coordinator.


James Lucas, a graphic design artist who worked with Garvin at the Wall Street Journal, said Garvin was easy to work with but more subtle aspects of his personality made people uncomfortable.


"When he wanted to be, he could be very charming and personable," Lucas said. "As I got to know him, his strange quirks would start to come out and he became harder to be around."


In 2005, Garvin was fired from the Wall Street Journal. Colleagues alleged in New York media Garvin was fired because of disruptive behavior. After being terminated, Garvin headed back to St. Louis to turn his attention to a longtime interest in filmmaking. He claimed to have produced film shorts and corporate and promotional videos since 1986.


On his personal Web site, http://www.geocities.com/drgarvin, Garvin had several films listed as being active projects as well as an idea for two TV shows called "The Darklys" and "Elucidation." Garvin described "The Darklys" as being a "Goth sitcom."
Garvin had been working on a film called "The Object" before he died. The film was about how a mysterious object "…comes into the possession of a philosophy professor, Jacob Miller. Miller and the Object cleave into the fabric of space-time to explore parallel lives."


Lucas worked with Garvin on one of the many film projects he produced. "Elucidation" was Garvin's idea for a television series about a secret organization concocting a plot against the government.


"He was good at what he did," Lucas said.


"He was very professional. He said he had saved up the money to hire actors and to pay the crew, which I thought was pretty impressive."


When Garvin returned to St. Louis in 2005, he began work on a film called "Ambient," in which a family finds its quiet life turned into a "surrealist nightmare" by "something unexpected in the barn," according to his Web site. Garvin approached a local filmmaker, Brent Jaimes, to help him make his movie. The pair began auditioning actors for the film and had even scouted a location for the shoot when Garvin abruptly announced he was leaving to work for HBO in New York.


However, HBO claimed to have no record of Garvin working there. He continued to work on his film projects, "Elucidation" and "The Darklys," which did not impress any major producers.


He took a job at a bar called the Raccoon Lodge in the Tribeca area of New York City from which he was fired shortly before the shooting took place.


Lucas said Garvin was not psychotic, as he feels the media has portrayed him.


"It was unfair to call him a maniac in the papers," Lucas said. "It seems his delusions of greatness as a filmmaker and goal of becoming a celebrity had taken a nasty turn."


Corrigan agreed and said Garvin's case was a tragic one that is not being handled properly by the media.


"The newspapers are putting him in the paper like some kind of freak," Corrigan said. "It trivializes the whole thing and turns it into a cartoon."


Corrigan also said the shooting should not reflect on Webster.


"This is an incident that involved someone who graduated almost two decades ago," Corrigan said. "It doesn't reflect our programs or our student body. It's wrong to characterize or stigmatize any college or university because of one graduate."


Videos on related sites.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8jh4bfTwY4
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bzn5SRwYr8

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