| CONNECTICUT POST Monday, September 29, 2003 -------------------------------- -REGIONAL NEWS--------------------------------- Parent maintains quest for justice No arrests made in son's murder from 2001 By: Kate Ramunni - Correspondent |
| BRIDGEPORT -- He was her baby, and she couldn't wait to see him. She was going to travel to Bridgeport from her home in Toronto, rent a hotel room and spend a week or two with her son, enjoying fall in New England. They would shop, go out to dinner - just spend time together. On Sept. 27, 2001, Eva Kiss sent a fax to her son, Zoltan - she called him Zolika - detailing her plans. But only hours later, he was dead, murdered on a Bridgeport street during the early morning the next day. "I just wanted to see him, to be with him, to touch him, to hold him, to talk to him," Kiss recalled last week. "These animals took all this away." And after two years, her greatest fear is those "animals" will never be punished, she said in a telephone interview from her home in Canada. Time hasn't dulled the pain Eva Kiss feels, from the time she wakes up in the morning until she falls asleep at night. Every day, Kiss deals with the fact that her son - and only child - was cruelly gunned down, with more than two dozen bullets, piercing his body. "Heartache, emptiness - |
| how do I explain this to an- one?" Kiss said. "I still wait and hope - Zolika will telephone, that he will knock on the door," she said, "even though I know what I saw at the medical examiner's office was real." She remembers the call that brought the unwelcome news. She remembers driving more than 14 hours from Toronto to the medical examiner's office in Farmington. She remembers sitting next to her son's cold body, holding his hand for the last time. She remembers the peaceful look on his face. But she mostly remembers happier times when Zoltan Kiss was growing up, first in Bridgeport, then in Toronto. Kiss, her son and husband lived in Bridgeport during the 1980's, but moved back to Toronto to escape Bridgeport's crime, Eva Kiss said. But several years later, after she and her husband divorced, he took the boy back to Bridgeport illegally, she said. He was killed near where the family had lived in Bridgeport. Zoltan was a carpenter and chimney sweeper who was about to start his own business when he was murdered about 3 a.m. Sept. 28, 2001, on Pembroke Street. |
| He was sitting in his girl- friend's car when he was shot, and his body was riddled with 25 bullets before he could get the car in gear and escape. He had no criminal back- ground and had no drugs, weapons or cash on him at the time of his murder, police said. Why Zoltan Kiss was gunned down still hasn't been established by police, although Eva Kiss said she has heard rumors of possible motives. She said she also knows there are people out there who could provide valuable infor- mation to police on her son's killer or killers. The state has posted a $50,000 reward for information in the case, and Eva Kiss herself has contributed another $10,000 to that amount. By working long hours and two and three jobs at a time, Kiss amassed the additional funds, and she continues to save to add to the reward in the hopes that her son's killers will be brought to justice. She will not rest, she said, until an arrest is made in the case. "With my last breath, I will not give up," she said. Though leads have been few, the case is not by any means cold, Bridgeport police spokeswoman Sheila Santiago said. |
| "The Bridgeport Police Department is continuing their investigation," Santiago said. "We are asking that anyone with information contact the Detective Bureau." Since the murder, both Kiss and her parents sold their condominiums, she said, and bought a house together. She has a puppy who sleeps with her at night, and a Colorado Spruce tree planted in the front yard in her son's memory. "We watch it with care and love," she said. Anyone with any information about the murder of Zoltan Kiss can call the Bridgeport Police Department Detective Bureau at 576-7624 |
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| Family time: Eva Kiss sits with her son, Zoltan, who was murdered in 2001 in Bridgeport. The case remains unsolved. |
| Correction note: The photo is of my Murdered Child, and his Grandmother. |