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Bronx residents Robert Pizarro and Juan Rivera were convicted of murdering a witness to prevent him from reporting to law enforcement, kidnapping conspiracy, kidnapping resulting in death, robbery conspiracy, robbery, and weapons offenses, arising out of the murder of federal cooperating witness and Garnerville resident Robert Bishun on Sept. 20, 2016.
On the day of Bishun’s murder, Pizarro and Rivera attempted to rob him at gunpoint inside his auto body shop in the Bronx. During the attempted robbery, two customers inside the building were bound with zip ties and locked in the trunks of two vehicles being worked on.
Geoffrey Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said that the two men learned that Bishun was a federal cooperating witness, Pizarro and Rivera kidnapped him from the shop, strangled him to death with a plastic zip tie and abandoned his body in the back of his own car on the side of the road in the Bronx.
Berman noted that Pizarro and another suspect had stormed into the auto body shop in January 2015, robbing approximately $10,000 in cash from Bishun. During that robbery, two customers were also zip tied.
Pizarro, 38, faces a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison plus 32 years. Rivera, 41, faces life in prison plus seven years. No sentencing date has been set.
“Just over two years ago, Robert Bishun was violently kidnapped and brutally murdered by the defendants because he was a federal cooperating witness," Berman said. "Today, the jury in this case returned a unanimous verdict holding the defendants accountable for their heinous crimes. We hope that today’s result brings some small measure of peace to Robert Bishun’s family.”
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