Woman freed from prison after new evidence contradicts accounts of 1999 NYC murder

A woman who has sat in prison for more than a decade was released Tuesday after new evidence contradicted accounts that she helped a hitman take out an innocent victim 25 years ago in the Bronx.Kimberly Hanzlik, 59, was convicted in 2011 alongside gunman Joseph Meldish for allegedly tipping Meldish off that his intended target, Thomas Brown, was sitting in Frenchy’s Tavern on East Tremont Avenue on March 21, 1999.A judge sentenced Hanzlik to 20 years to life in state prison, and that’s where she languished — until new evidence unearthed by the Bronx District Attorney’s Office cast doubt on whether she was ever even at the Bronx watering hole when the murder took place.

The story went that Meldish — who is suspected of being involved in 40 gangland murders — was furious that Brown, a one-time drug dealer, refused to lend him cash for a deal, then reported him to the cops when Meldish burglarized his home in retribution.Hanzlik — then a crack-addicted prostitute — allegedly went with Meldish and another man to the Throggs Neck bar where Brown hung out, peaked in, saw him sitting with his wife and told Meldish he was there.Meldish busted in and shot the man eight times, killing him.But it turned out Meldish had actually gunned down Brown’s lookalike brother, Joey.And unfortunately for Hanzlik, Meldish’s getaway driver testified that she’d helped the criminals carry out their dastardly mission — which led to her conviction.In 2021, Hanzlik’s attorneys asked the DA’s Conviction Integrity Bureau to re-investigate the case — and that’s when they found old police documents that quoted the getaway driver as saying Hanzlik wasn’t there when the shooting went down.Investigators also found that Brown’s wife — who claimed she’d seen Hanzlik in the bar before the shooting — never mentioned her until 2006, seven years after the killing.And the now-deceased NYPD detective who got the identification coerced a false ID in a separate, unrela...