Bodies of Murdered Women Flown Home to Long Island
Two Long Island women who were murdered in Arizona by a deranged student were flown to New York last night for burial, a rabbi who has been acting as a liaison to the families in Arizona said.
Carol Kestenbaum, left, and Nicole Schiffman were shot and killed by a man in Arizona early Sunday morning. Their bodies were flown to Long Island, where they grew up, last night. This picture was taken just hours before they were killed.
Carol Kestenbaum and Nicole Schiffman, both 20 and sophomores in college, grew up in Bellmore, N.Y. Schiffman had flown from the University of Maryland to Tempe, Ariz., on Thursday to celebrate Kestenbaum's birthday. They spent the night watching a student production of "Rent" at Arizona State University, where Kestenbaum was studying earlychildhood education, and socializing.
In the shadow of a stairwell at Kestenbaum's apartment, Joshua Mendel, 22, waited for them, a spokesman for the Tempe Police Department, Sergeant Daniel Masters, said. When the women returned to the apartment complex not long after 4 a.m., Mendel emerged from the dark and shot Kestenbaum in the head and Schiffman in the back as she tried to run away. He then turned the pistol on himself, Sergeant Masters said. Kestenbaum and Mendel died instantly. Schiffman died at a trauma center in Phoenix about an hour and a half later.
Mendel was apparently angry with Kestenbaum for telling her friend, who was dating Mendel, that she didn't think they should be in a relationship.
"No one supported the relationship," a friend of Kestenbaum's, ASU student Honora Swanson Bobar, 19, said. "He creeped me out every time I met him. … It's just that feeling inside you."
Sergeant Masters said that a review of departmental records yesterday showed that Mendel had called the department for help with alcohol dependency earlier this month, but had no previous run-ins with the law.
"There are no words for this terrible tragedy," the rabbi of the Chabad Jewish Center at the university, Shmuel Tichtel, said. "We can't really understand it. Right now the tragedy is very raw."
Mr. Tichtel helped arrange for the bodies to be flown back to New York in accordance with Jewish tradition.
"She was a wonderful person," Ms. Swanson Bobar said of Kestenbaum. "I haven't made it to school today at all. … Everyone is just floored."
The families of Kestenbaum and Schiffman couldn't be reached yesterday. Schiffman's father, Ronald, told the Scottsdale Tribune that his daughter was an "angel."
