They were prophetic words, but they meant little to David Garvin’s brother at the time.
Just weeks before David Garvin massacred a bartender and two auxiliary cops in Greenwich Village, he called his brother and told him, “If anything ever happens to me, remember the name Morales.”
Charles Garvin said he dismissed the warning and forgot all about it until he read that the first man his brother executed Wednesday night was Alfredo Romero Morales, a 35-year-old bartender at De Marco’s Pizzeria and Restaurant, where David Garvin was a regular.
Recalling the strange conversation, Charles Garvin told the Daily News yesterday he had asked his brother why he should remember the name.
“He said there’s a cocaine element, a criminal element, at the Raccoon Lodge that made him nervous,” Charles Garvin said.
David Garvin, who was working as a bartender at the Raccoon Lodge in Tribeca at the time, also told his brother that “there was another bartender he had a problem with.”
“He felt threatened by this guy,” Charles Garvin said from his home in St. Louis. “He gave me no indication he was going to do anything. He just said, ‘Remember the name Morales.'”
Witnesses told cops that Morales appeared to recognize David Garvin before the 42-year-old shot him 15 times in the back. But Morales’ girlfriend, Martha Pioquinto, said he never mentioned Garvin, never worked at the Raccoon Lodge and didn’t know anything about drugs.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” she said. “And everybody knew him as Romero,” not Morales.
Police are investigating whether David Garvin shot Morales to avenge the firing of a pal who had worked at the pizzeria as a chef.
Charles Garvin said it’s possible his brother gunned down the wrong Morales and dreamed up the cocaine conspiracy because he was struggling with paranoia – and refused to see a doctor.
“He had gone into feeling that people were following him and watching him,” the 33-year-old said. “He was trying to get control of it with herbal remedies. He knew he had a problem.”
A failed filmmaker who worked for The Wall Street Journal for a time, David Garvin also had become obsessed recently with “Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad’s haunting story of a man’s descent into depravity.
“He started transcribing the story word for word,” his brother said. “If you’re already in a dark place, it doesn’t help to go darker. He just gave in to it.”
But David Garvin gave his brother no indication that he was planning to kill anyone. The day before the killing spree, David Garvin left a chipper message on his brother’s voice mail.
“I’m just pedaling around on my bicycle in Manhattan near my new apartment, having a good time,” David Garvin said. “So give me a ring, buddy. And we’ll chat.”
The next evening, David Garvin donned a fake beard, grabbed two guns and 135 rounds of ammunition and went on the bloody rampage that ended only when cops shot and killed him on Bleecker St.
The cold-blooded murders of the auxiliary cops were captured on a videotape, which Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly released Thursday.
Charles Garvin said he watched the disturbing footage more than once and believes his demented brother was not suicidal. “He loved himself too much to kill himself,” the brother said. “It’s just a terrible, terrible tragedy.”
In a two-hour interview, the strapping ex-Marine broke down in tears and said his family is mourning the deaths of Morales and the slain auxiliary cops, Nicholas Pekearo, 28, and Eugene Marshalik, 19.
“We’re all feeling for the families that were innocent,” he said.
Then he began describing his brother’s descent into madness – a journey that appears to have started around the time he was drummed out of the Marines for refusing orders.
“It was a wrong choice for his temperament,” said Charles Garvin. “He punched a few people out. He backed a drill instructor down.”
After the Marines, David Garvin went to journalism school and married his high school sweetheart. That marriage ended in divorce, and with a new girlfriend in tow, he wound up in Bullhead City, Ariz., where he covered crime for the Mojave Daily News.
“It really affected him seeing all that death,” Charles Garvin said of his brother, who by then was remarried with two kids. “He used to come home and tell his kids, ‘I order you not to die.'”
Restless, unhappy and struggling financially, David Garvin abandoned his family and headed to New York, where he worked in The Wall Street Journal’s typography department.
For the first three years, David Garvin’s life was “blissful” and he found love once more with his third wife, his brother said. But he grew angry after the 9/11 attacks and fell deeply in debt.
“He was getting more and more obsessed with his movies,” his brother said. “I was really alarmed when I read his scripts. They were so far disconnected from reality.”
Asked why he agreed to talk about his brother, Charles Garvin said he wasn’t trying to excuse what he did.
“The only reason I granted this interview was I wanted to put a human face to my brother,” he said.
