A Centereach man who admitted beating a friend to death with a baseball bat when they were both 16 and then burying and then digging up his victim’s remains to move them to a neighbor’s yard was sentenced Thursday to 20 years in prison.
John Mann IV, now 20, apologized for killing Henry Hernandez after taking Mann’s father’s pickup truck and damaging it. He pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and tampering with physical evidence in March and will be eligible for parole when he turns 36, prosecutors noted during the sentencing.
“[Hernandez] took a pickup truck for a ride and caused damage,” Assistant District Attorney Frank Schroeder told Acting Suffolk Superior Court Judge Anthony Senft in Riverhead. “For this crime, this defendant believed that justice demanded that Henry Hernández receive the death penalty… [he] he decided to be judge, jury and executioner”.
Schroeder said the two teenagers led troubled lives. Hernández was born in Guatemala months after his father’s death. His mother left him to be raised by a grandmother when he was only one month old. He came to the United States with an aunt a decade later.
Hernandez had been in and out of foster homes, had a child and was living on the streets when she met Mann at a psychiatric hospital in March 2019, Schroeder said. He would end up spending time with Mann, who had recently attempted suicide, at his home in Centereach until the van incident a month later.
On June 2, 2019, Mann asked Hernandez, who was living at the Timothy Hill Children’s Ranch in Riverhead at the time, to meet him at a “sandbox” less than a mile from his home, where he was waiting with duct tape and a baseball bat, he admitted during his change of plea hearing in March. Mann tied the tape around Hernandez’s ankles, wrist and face and hit him repeatedly in the head and body.
Hernandez’s lifeless body was thrown into a pre-dug hole and covered with debris, where it remained until March 15, 2020, when Mann dug it up again, he admitted. Mann packed Hernandez’s remains first in plastic bags and then in a trash can, and moved them to his next-door neighbor’s property on Jay Road, where they were found that day, more than nine months after the murder
Schroeder said Mann dumped the remains on his neighbor’s property in hopes the neighbor would be blamed.
Suffolk Police Homicide Detective Mike Repperger reconstructed the case over the next two years, Schroeder said. The big break came 11 months into the investigation, when Repperger was able to remove a fingerprint from a piece of duct tape. Police eventually identified Hernandez as the victim, and Mann was charged with second-degree murder in June 2022.
“We hope this plea and sentence will serve as a measure of justice for Henry Hernandez and his family,” Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said in a statement. “This is a truly heartbreaking and horrific case.”
Mann, who was supported at the sentencing by his father and a grandmother, thanked Senft for a sentence that will give him a second chance at life.
“I will become a functional member of society,” said the judge.
Senft said Mann’s time behind bars can be used to improve his life and to think about where he might have ended up if he had chosen not to get revenge on Hernandez.
“You can write the next chapter of your life,” the judge told Mann.
Defense attorney Matthew Rosenblum, who was assisted by attorney Rudolph Migliore, said he is confident his client will make the most of his opportunity.
“It happens. There’s no excuse,” Rosenblum said. “It’s hard to be grateful, and it wasn’t an easy negotiation, but in the end, the system worked here.”
Grant Parpan covers Suffolk County and federal courts for Newsday. A native of Long Island, he joined Newsday in 2022.
