On February 19, 1999, Miami Police arrested 25-year-old who is wanted in New York for at least one murder and two rapes. Surveillance teams tailing him decided to move in when he was located at the Sun Hotel in downtown Miami. Two SWAT teams cleared out the rest of the hotel and found him in a room on the top floor.
New York City police believe Kee is responsible for a string of slayings and rapes in East Harlem. Officers also found a 16-year-old girl in another part of the sixth floor. Crowley identified her as Angelique Stallings, who had been missing since she went out on a Valentine's Day date with Kee. Police also are investigating whether Kee, nicknamed the "East Harlem Rapist" by the New York media, was involved in the killings of two other teen-age girls in 1991 and 1997. "Arohn Kee is every young lady's worst nightmare," New York Deputy Inspector Joseph Reznick said earlier this week.
On December 20, 2000, a New York jury convicted Kee the slayings of three girls and the rapes of four others during an eight-year crime spree. Kee, 27, faces life without parole in state prison when he is sentenced January 26. Kee was charged with murdering three Harlem girls between 1991 and 1998. Four other victims, ranging in age from 13 to 15, were raped.
One girl may have been burned alive on a rooftop. Another had her life's breath squeezed out of her, and a third, only 13, was strangled and stabbed three times in her bare left breast. No mother should have to suffer what the mothers of these three murdered teenage girls are suffering on the 12th floor of a lower Manhattan courthouse.
As just one example of his alleged cunning, Kee - a computer whiz, self-styled rap artist and convicted thief - repeatedly outwitted police attempts to get his DNA and link him to the attacks. Once, when he was held last year on a petit-larceny charge, he declined a cheek swab - cops lied that it was a "tuberculosis test" - claiming, at the brink of signing a consent form, that he was a Jehovah's Witness, opposed to invasive medical procedures. "He suddenly got religious," one investigator recalled.
The prosecution presented DNA evidence recovered from six of his seven victims that matched Kee's. Police obtained Kee's DNA from a coffee cup he used while in custody at the time of his February 19, 1999, arrest. In a bizarre twist, Kee testified in his own defense, ignoring his lawyers' advice. He insisted in two days of rambling and disjointed testimony that he was innocent of the murders and rapes and accused the police of framing him. He insisted police arrested him because of the Amadou Diallo shooting in Feb. 4, 1999, in which police fired 41 shots at an unarmed, innocent man. Kee's explanation as to how his DNA got on six of the seven victims was that police "planted the DNA on the girls (and) it had something to do with genetic shuffling."