The days go by and the commotion, the doubts and the pain in the city of NY do not end, after they were found the lifeless bodies of a man, a woman and their two children inside an apartment on 86th Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue in Manhattan. The macabre scene was discovered this Monday.
So far, all preliminary hypotheses point to the fact that Edison López, 41, stabbed his family to death and later committed suicide with an accurate neck wound. 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, one would be in charge of one of the cases of femicide, filicide and suicide simultaneous, most terrible 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 a family of immigrants who 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 children, with the involvement of community leaders from anti-domestic violence organizations and clergy.
In this sense, Stephanie McGraw, Founder and CEO of WARM Inc., an organization against domestic violence, considered that “many times silence hides many types of aggression. We need to take more seriously tragedy of domestic violence to prevent these murders that have no color or social class”.
WARN spokespersons say that they do not have the specific details of this crimeThey 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 silent 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) He 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 in that neighborhood and fall in love with Witek, whose family came from Poland.
López, the apparent protagonist of the murder-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 possible to know 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 that his son was responsible for this crime and added that they were together last weekend and “Nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed wrong.”
When the murderer is a relative:
This year New York has been marked by a series of bloody events and murders where unfortunately the accused and accused of the crimesThey 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 policeman Alexis Martínez, shot to death by his father, who then shot himself in his apartment in the Bronx. Also, this Wednesday August Velasco47 years old He is the main suspect in the murder of his 76-year-old father, José Velasco, with a knife. The crime was confirmed in Yonkers.
- In June, a teenager with emotional problems was arrested on suspicion of stab his father to death at his home in Queens, where police had just responded to a 911 call.
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