Decomposed Bodies Found In Manhattan

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The New York Sun

The decomposed bodies of a woman and her 9-year-old daughter were found yesterday inside their Upper Manhattan apartment, some time after police believe they were bludgeoned to death.

As of last night, police did not name any suspects in what they are calling a double homicide. However, there were no signs of forced entry at the apartment, police said, and the home did not appear to have been burglarized.

Police discovered the bodies around 1 p.m. inside the victims’ ninth-floor apartment at the Frederick Douglass Houses on West 100th Street, an expansive housing project. Neighbors who identified the mother and child as Maria Rivera, a woman in her 50s, and her daughter, Mariah, said the two hadn’t been seen in several days. However, it was school officials who notified authorities when the girl missed several days of school, those familiar with the case said.

Yesterday, police and representatives from the New York City Housing Authority opened the victims’ door to an onerous smell. They found Rivera’s body wrapped in a blanket on the floor of a bedroom. Her daughter’s body was also wrapped in a blanket, and stuffed inside a closet in another room, police said.

While police indicated that the Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death, authorities believe the victims’ assailant used blunt force trauma when attacking them.

A woman who lives on the same floor as the victims, Maria Sanchez, 80, said she last saw the victims’ alive this past Friday. Before then, she saw the two every morning when the daughter headed off to school. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s very sad.”

After returning home from school yesterday, a 9-year-old schoolmate of the slain girl, Ronnice Jimenez, said she hadn’t seen the fourth-grader in a while, either. “She was always happy, she was always nice,” the girl, who attends P.S. 163 on West 97th Street, said. “I feel scared and sad.”

Other neighbors and passersby were stunned to learn of their deaths, and appeared shocked when an SUV from the Medical Examiner’s office pulled up in front of the building around 4 p.m. Before yesterday, only three murders were reported in the 24th precinct on the Upper West Side, according to the police department’s CompStat report through October 15. In 2005, three murders were reported.


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