He was a handsome porter at an Upper East Side apartment building, popular with the residents and staff who knew him as Arthur. Like his father before him, he raised pigeons on the roof of his family’s home in Brooklyn.

Police said Pasqual Esposito, 30, was stabbed to death by Steven Figeruoa while fighting over a woman. Mr. Figeruoa, a 22-year-old senior at SUNY-Albany, had planned to join the Army after graduation in June, according to relatives.

The two men confronted each other Saturday at 8:45 p.m. near 345 E. 80th St., where Esposito, 30, worked. Mr. Figueroa was angry because Esposito had been calling his girlfriend, police sources said.

“We saw Arthur with a girl and guy arguing,” a neighbor, Yitshak Benshoshan, 50, said. “She was holding the guy, pushing him toward the car and trying to push Arthur and telling him to go. … She said, ‘Forget it, go back to your job.'”

There was a scream, and the two men came to blows.

“Then Arthur separated from him,” and walked away holding his side, Mr. Benshoshan said. The woman and Mr. Figueroa took off with their arms linked; Mr. Figueroa’s face was “very pale and very agitated,” he said.

Esposito was pronounced dead in New York Hospital.

Mr. Figueroa later turned himself in and was arrested and charged with murder in the second degree, police said. He had not been arraigned as of press time.

The woman, who wasn’t identified yesterday, and Mr. Figueroa had worked last summer as staff at a neighboring building, which is when Esposito met her, a concierge who worked alongside Esposito, Ovidio Alvarez, said.

“She was after him … he had lots of girls after him,” Mr. Alvarez said.

She temporarily broke up her relationship with Mr. Figueroa, but they later got back together and returned to SUNY, police sources said. This week they were in town for spring break when Mr. Figueroa learned that Esposito had been calling her, which led to the fatal encounter.

A Bronx man who identified himself as Mr. Figueroa’s uncle said his nephew was defending himself.

“The guy tried to choke him,” he said. “He didn’t have the ghetto mentality. He walked away from conflict.”

Esposito’s family was preparing for his funeral yesterday, a cousin, Gloria Fitzgibbon, 40, said.

“He was never in trouble with anybody,” she said. “An honest good working kid.”

Although his father comes from an Italian family of 14, Esposito was an only child, she said. He lived on the top floor of a building owned by his family in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. On the roof he raised several hundred pigeons. The ownership tags on the pigeons read, “Father and Son,” because it was a pastime that connected him to his father, who had raised pigeons for years, Ms. Fitzgibbon said.

Residents of the building where Esposito worked, the East Winds, said his death had already reverberated throughout the building.

“I saw him lying face up in a massive pool of blood,” Ethel Shearer said. When she ran downstairs to ask the doorman what had happened, she found him “sobbing hysterically and banging his fist on the desk,” saying, “‘No, no, no.'”