A 3-year-old Manhattan boy entered his parents’ bedroom yesterday and found his mother lying on the floor dead with a cord around her neck and his father’s body hanging from a ceiling pipe.

Juan Garcia, the dead man’s brother, lives across the hall at the Lower East Side walk-up. Mr. Garcia answered his door at 10:33 a.m. to find the boy standing there. “Mami y Papi estan muertos,” said the boy. Mr. Garcia called 911 after he went into the apartment and took in the grisly scene.

Julio Garcia, 50, and Milagro Tavares, 36, identified as common-law husband and wife, were pronounced dead at their fourth-floor apartment at 91 Clinton St. The police declined to identify whether the deaths were homicides or suicides or a combination. The boy was home at the time of the deaths.

Neighbors and family members were shocked and several distraught women wailed with grief in front of the row house, its entrance sealed off with police tape.

Garcia, nicknamed “Choco” because of his dark skin, was described as friendly and chatty by neighbors who passed him in the street or in the halls. He played guitar in a Dominican bachata band called Los Hermanos Unidos, known for livening up block parties. Three of its five members were blind, said Mr. Garcia.

Speaking in Spanish, Mr. Garcia said he “didn’t notice anything unusual” about his brother, who “was always joking around. Everything was cool.”

Garcia and Tavares seemed like “very happy people,” said Luis Rivera, 30, as he browsed at Santo Domingo Bakery & Coffee Shop at 93 Clinton St. “They didn’t seem like they had any problems, like your neighborhood couple waking with their baby in the park.”

Tavares was a quiet woman with three children who had recently immigrated from the Dominican Republic. Tavares kept to herself, and seemed to spend most of her time cleaning and looking after her children, who ranged in age from 3 to 19.

“I would see her cleaning in the hallways or picking up the little ones from school,” said Kaisha Ocasio, 15, a student at the High School of Fashion Industries who lives upstairs from the deceased. “She never used to dress up or anything.”

While Ms. Ocasio said Garcia used to chat with her in the hallways, she described Tavares as “more to herself” and “more to her home.”

Ms. Ocasio said she never heard sounds of fighting or abuse from the apartment. “The little boy used to cry on occasion, but I didn’t think anything of it,” she said.

Tavares’s aunt, Rosa Abreu, said in Spanish that there were no overt signs of abuse in the family, but she suspected there was trouble behind closed doors. “There were no obvious problems, but I could tell there was something wrong by her silence,” said Ms. Abreu.

Neighbors and gawkers crowded a Medical Examiner’s van as the corpses were removed in body bags about four hours after they were discovered.

Though a man had died of natural causes in the building in recent weeks, neighbors said that police tape and investigators were an uncommon sight in the otherwise peaceful neighborhood.

Jodie Jacobs, 25, said she had no crime problems since moving to the neighborhood four years ago from Brattleboro, Vt.

“My family is afraid to come to the city because of all the stories, but I tell them I live in a good neighborhood,” said Ms. Jacobs.

Prior to yesterday killings, the Lower East Side’s 7th Precinct had only two homicides this year.

The scene at Clinton Street marks the city’s second double-victim domestic fatality in as many days. A boyfriend and girlfriend were shot dead Sunday morning at the man’s Jamaica, Queens, residence.

The bodies were discovered by the woman’s parents, who went to the home at 204th Street after they were unable to contact her for three days.

The medical examiner ruled the Queens fatalities to be a homicide-suicide. The woman, 22, was murdered by a gunshot wound to the head that perforated her skull and brain, according to the Medical Examiner, while the man, 30, shot himself through the chest and lung.

No one else was involved in the killings, police said.