The days go by and the shock, doubts and pain in New York City do not end, after the lifeless bodies of a man, a woman and their two children were found inside an apartment on 86th street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue in Manhattan. The macabre scene was discovered this Monday.
Until now, all the preliminary hypotheses point to the fact that Edison López, 41, stabbed his family to death and later committed suicide with an accurate wound to the neck. What is still not close to being clear is exactly what were the “dark threads” that were woven to make this bloody tragedy happen.
In theory, this would be one of the most terrible cases of simultaneous femicide, filicide and suicide in recent history.
The victims were identified as Alexandra Witek, 40, and her two sons Calvin and Lucien, ages 1 and 3, respectively. The alleged attacker, for years was a janitor of the building where they lived. He was the son of an immigrant family that had come from Venezuela several decades ago.
This Thursday, four days after this murder, neighbors, friends and relatives held a vigil in memory of the murdered mother and her two sons, with the participation of community leaders from organizations fighting domestic violence and clergy.
In this sense, Stephanie McGraw, founder and executive director of WARM Inc., an organization against domestic violence, considered that “many times silence hides many types of aggression. We need to take the tragedy of domestic violence more seriously to prevent these murders that have no color or social class.”
WARN spokesmen say they do not have the specific details of this crime, they also do not know if there was a history of physical or psychological violence. However, they put all the lights on the fact: “There are two children and a mother murdered inside their house.”
“Right now there are thousands of people in this city who are silently enduring abuse for many reasons. Let’s lose fear. There are ways to report and prevent the worst,” McGraw remarked.
No history of violence
Until this Thursday, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had not advanced new elements of this terrible event. But it was confirmed that they recovered several knives in the apartment.
Neither the police nor the neighbors show a history of domestic violence within the López family. On the contrary, all the witnesses describe a cheerful and cooperative couple who were always willing to help others.
The couple had known each other their entire lives. Both were first-generation Americans and went to high school together. They then reconnected years later and had two children.
Many neighbors say they saw López grow up in that neighborhood and fall in love with Witek, whose family came from Poland.
Lopez, the apparent protagonist of the homicide-suicide, had been preparing to move to Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester County for a new job, said Joseph E. Kenny, NYPD deputy chief of detectives.
It was learned that the detectives are investigating, if any situation related to the stress of the move, could have been the element that triggered the criminal action.
Edison’s father, Mario López, told local media that he did not believe his son was responsible for this crime, adding that they were together last weekend and “nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed to be wrong.”
When the murderer is a relative:
This year New York has been marked by a series of bloody events and murders where, unfortunately, those accused and accused of the crimes have been part of the same family.
- The case of the López Witek family is the second alleged homicide-suicide within a family in the Big Apple in a matter of weeks. On August 2, the young Dominican police officer, Alexis Martínez, was shot to death by his father, who later shot himself in his apartment in the Bronx. In addition, this Wednesday August Velasco, 47, is the main suspect in having murdered his father José Velasco, 76, with a knife. The crime was confirmed in Yonkers.
- In early August, a suicidal doctor killed her baby in Westchester County, New York, in a possible case of postpartum depression.
- In July, a 26-year-old man was accused of fatally stabbing his younger sister at a Harlem residence.
- In addition, Julio Roscoe Danielson was arrested in connection with the murders of his mother and brother, whose bodies were found respectively at home and in a garbage bag on a street in Queens.
- In June, an emotionally troubled teen was arrested on suspicion of stabbing his father to death at their Queens home, where police had just responded to a 911 call.
- In May a young man was arrested on suspicion of killing his father in Ulster County, New York. And on Long Island a 44-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of stabbing his elderly mother and his younger sister.
- Last December Nikki Secondino, a 22-year-old transgender woman, was arrested after confessing that she had stabbed her father to death and seriously injured herself and her younger sister to fake a violent robbery at their Brooklyn home.