A man allegedly killed his sister because she had the volume on the television turned up too high.

The fight began on the first floor of the siblings’ home yesterday in Brownsville with Ozem Goldwire, 27, and Sherika Goldwire, 28, trading slaps and punches, police said. The Goldwires made their way up to the second floor of their otherwise empty house, where the man strangled his sister to death and then called 911 to report the crime, police said.

The woman died from asphyxia by compression of the neck and occlusion of the mouth and nose, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office, Ellen Borakove, said. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office said Mr. Goldwire faced charges of second-degree murder.

Mr. Goldwire and his sister resided in a $263,300 two-family dwelling owned by their mother, Essie Goldwire. While police said the siblings had no criminal histories, neighbors did not express shock after Mr. Goldwire’s arrest Tuesday.

Lisa Folk, 37, who lives in a building abutting the Goldwires’ home, described the siblings as “eccentric.” She said Mr. Goldwire was an amiable man who said hello and tended to her snow shoveling. “He was a nice neighbor,” she said. His sister was a Jehovah’s Witness who “wasn’t friendly at all,” Ms. Folk said. The relationship between the Folks and Sherika Goldwire turned sour when the Folks rejected her attempts to convert them to her religion, Ms. Folk said.

A neighbor in the house on the other side of and adjacent to the Goldwires’ building, Antonia Norbert, 37, said she knew Mr. Goldwire from the block but that she could not recall his sister. He was so consistent with his greetings that Ms. Norbert said her 5-year-old daughter, Turneka, gave Mr. Goldwire a nickname: “The man who always says, ‘Hi.’ “