Insights into the life of Oscar Belgal, who became Zohran Mamdani's favorite illegal alien criminal after he was shot by ICE agents in the Bronx on October 8. ──────────────── Belgal hailed from a poor urban neighborhood in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. In an interview there last week, his grandmother, Juana de León, said she had raised Mr. Belgal, as well as other grandchildren, because his mother was absent. Belgal left the Dominican Republic and made it to Colombia by October 2022, according to Carlos Martínez, a Dominican man he befriended there. Together, they travelled through Darién Gap in Panama until reaching Mexico. “We slept together, we ate together, we did everything together,” Mr. Martínez, 25, said in an interview. Belgal told acquaintances that he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in late 2022 without being apprehended. He soon "found refuge" [as the Times describes it] in Washington Heights. In December 2023, police officers arrested Belgal because two months before, according to prosecutors, he and another man had robbed two people Oscar Belgal knew: Mr. Martínez [same as above] and his wife, Yesica Torres. The couple told the officers that they had gone clubbing in the Bronx on Oct. 2, 2023, with Belgal and the other man, whom they did not know. While they were all sitting inside a car, Belgal’s accomplice pointed a gun from the driver’s seat at the couple, who were seated in the back, and demanded they hand over their jewelry, prosecutors said. Belgal, seated in the passenger’s seat, took their chains and rings, and about $1,100 in cash, before kicking them out of the car, according to prosecutors. Belgal faced 18 criminal charges, but his lawyer negotiated a deal with prosecutors. Belgal pleaded guilty to just one charge: grand larceny in the fourth degree, a nonviolent felony. He received five years of probation. Mr. Martínez and Ms. Torres, who said they were scarred by Mr. Belgal’s betrayal, said they fled to the Dominican Republic after his arrest because they felt intimidated by him. “We put him in jail, and he stayed in touch with us,” Ms. Torres, 35, said in a phone interview last week from the Dominican Republic, describing how Mr. Belgal had accused them of “snitching” on him. “He threatened us.” From January to June 2025, Belgal sold plastic bags of cocaine to an undercover officer during multiple exchanges near his building on Wadsworth Avenue, and on at least one occasion, a bag that also had fentanyl and heroin, prosecutors said in a criminal complaint. Belgal was arrested in August 2025 and charged with 10 counts of criminal sale of a controlled substance. He pleaded not guilty to all counts; the case has not been resolved. nytimes.com/2026/10/18/nyreg…