The family of slain NYPD officer Anthony Dwyer appeared at a parole hearing in Midtown on Nov. 6 to oppose the release of the man convicted of killing him in 1989 — the fifth such hearing in three years for convicted murderer Eddie Matos.
Dwyer’s sister, Maureen Brissett, said she had expected the next hearing to come in February, until she got a call last week informing her a new hearing had been scheduled for Nov. 6. She attended with her brother, her 18-year-old son and her 16-year-old daughter. Her 85-year-old mother, who has lung cancer, could not make the trip.
Matos, now 58, is serving 25 years to life at the maximum-security Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County for the second-degree murder of Dwyer, a 23-year-old Midtown South officer. He has been denied parole more than a dozen times, most recently in October 2025, when the Parole Board cited Dwyer’s killing “together with your sustained pattern of serious institutional misconduct, including violent and weapons-related infractions” in prison, as well as “multiple convictions in Connecticut for burglary, larceny and theft of a firearm” predating the killing.
This month’s hearing came after the Dutchess County Supreme Court ordered a new review at the request of Matos’s pro bono attorney, Isaac Zaur of the Madison Avenue firm Clarick Gueron Reisbaum. Zaur argued the Parole Board had “relied on an impermissible mischaracterization” of Matos’s prison record, noting in court papers that Matos has received no disciplinary reports since 2019 and that his only two tickets since 2013 were for “talking in the hallway.” Zaur did not respond to requests for comment.
“I just feel like, they’re doing this just for him to keep getting more chances and thinking that, my family’s gonna just say, ‘That’s enough,'” Brissett said the day before the hearing. “But he’s sadly mistaken because that’s not ever going to happen.”
What happened in 1989
Dwyer and two other officers responded to a report of an armed robbery at a McDonald’s on Seventh Avenue and West 40th Street in Times Square on Oct. 17, 1989, and spotted Matos fleeing the scene.
“As soon as my brother got up there, Matos was waiting and kicked him down an air shaft and then escaped,” Brissett said. Officers who reached Dwyer first said he told them, before he died, that Matos had pushed him. Dwyer fell 40 feet and later died at Bellevue Hospital. Matos was sentenced in 1990.
A system under scrutiny
Under current rules, victims’ families may read impact statements at parole hearings but cannot address the inmate directly. Inmates ordinarily receive hearings every two years, but courts can order additional
