Dwayne Murray, the Mount Vernon youth basketball coach charged with sexually abusing a girl on his 8th-grade team, pleaded guilty Friday to Course of Sexual Conduct Against a Child in the First Degree. According to the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, Murray admitted to subjecting a victim under 13 to repeated sexual conduct — including at least one act of oral sexual conduct — over a five-month period between October 2023 and March 2024. He faces 18 years in state prison and 20 years of post-release supervision at sentencing on November 17, and will be required to register as a sex offender.
What the DA’s press release doesn’t mention: nine days before Murray’s May 14, 2025 arrest, Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard is alleged to have personally told him that allegations against him had surfaced — an allegation raised in a now-closed taxpayer lawsuit against her, and corroborated by Murray’s public statements at the time.
The Tip
According to the complaint and as disclosed in public Facebook posts, on April 28, 2025, Patterson-Howard received a text message reading: “I’m hearing troubling reports that a middle-aged close associate of yours is accused of having inappropriate physical relations with a 14-year-old eighth grader and of stealing from a nonprofit organization. It is also being reported that you were aware of both allegations. Is this true?” The message did not name Murray.
A week later, on May 5, Murray posted a six-minute Facebook Live video denying wrongdoing — and, in doing so, confirmed that Patterson-Howard had told him about the message. Quoting Murray directly from that video, as recorded in the court filing: “On Monday, April 28, I had a chat with Mayor Shawyn Patterson Howard. She told me she got a text message from Greg Bonaparte with some serious allegations against her and a few others. As I’ve said, I was one of them… The mayor rightfully sent a copy of Bonaparte’s text to the Westchester District Attorney’s Office. By the way, I’m an eighth grade girls’ basketball coach for the Mount Vernon Junior Knights.” Murray called the allegations “a smear campaign to silence me, plain and simple,” which he attributed to his public support for the mayor’s endorsed candidates in that spring’s school board election.
Nine days after that video, Murray was arrested. Investigators recovered “sexually inappropriate text messages” between Murray and the victim from his devices, and Murray confessed then to the conduct he pleaded guilty to Friday.
The Lawsuit Never Reached the Merits
The allegation surfaced in a taxpayer action filed under General Municipal Law § 51 by a Mount Vernon resident, pro se, against Patterson-Howard and the City. The suit was built mainly around claims that the mayor misused an on-duty police security detail for political travel and distributed city-branded campaign mailers ahead of the May 2025 school and library board elections; her handling of the Murray tip was cited as one piece of evidence that she used her office to shield a political ally, under Public Officers Law § 74(3)(h).
In their motion to dismiss, attorneys for the Mayor and the City did not merely dispute the tip-off allegation — they mocked it. Their July 14, 2025 memorandum called it “at best plaintiff’s baseless imaginings,” accused him of taking “a page from QAnon’s playbook,” and argued the claim was “ludicrous slander.” The memo went on to insist that if the plaintiff genuinely believed anyone was “complicit in pedophilia,” he should have gone to law enforcement “immediately” — treating the premise itself as absurd on its face.
The case’s path to dismissal wasn’t straightforward, either. Justice Thomas Quinones, originally assigned to the case, recused himself on August 27, 2025, citing on the official recusal form “a personal and political connection to a litigant” that could call his impartiality into question; the form does not identify which party or describe the connection, but it was not the plaintiff, so it could only be the mayor. The very next day, a different justice, Robert S. Ondrovic, dismissed the case in its entirety—in a threadbare, two-paragraph decision that never engaged the merits at all. Instead, the decision rested on a questionable finding that the plaintiff lacked standing under GML § 51 and stated, without explanation, that the complaint alleged no violations of law, ignoring pages of factual assertions, documentary evidence, and specific claims under state and local law. As a result, the attorney’s attacks on the tip-off allegation were never put to the test, and the court made no finding about whether the mayor abused her office by warning Murray.
Why It Matters Now
Murray’s guilty plea answers a gateway factual question the lawsuit could only allege in 2025: the conduct alleged in the text was real, and Murray was the “close associate” it concerned. And by Murray’s own account, the mayor told him directly about the text, nine days before his arrest.
Mount Vernon voters weighing a potential third term for Patterson-Howard now have something more concrete than a dismissed lawsuit to weigh: a convicted felon who says, in his own words, that the mayor told him he was under scrutiny before law enforcement moved, based on a text message that never used his name.