Police have charged a man with killing a Bronx woman who was found dead near a highway in Yonkers.
NYPD officials said officers found the woman, who had been missing from an apartment on Morris Avenue near East 182nd Street in Fordham Heights, by the Saw Mill River Parkway around 10 a.m. Emergency medical workers arrived and pronounced her dead on the scene.
Police on Friday did not immediately release her identity but said at the time the city medical examiner’s office was working to determine how she died.
Citing law enforcement sources, several news outlets reported the woman was 26-year-old Pamela Alcantara, who the NYPD previously said was last seen at her Bronx apartment building around 2 a.m. Sunday. Alcantara’s family told ABC7 and the Daily News that was the last day they had heard from her.
On Friday afternoon, police arrested 46-year-old Junior Perez Diaz, who they confirmed was the deceased woman's boyfriend. He was charged with murder, manslaughter and kidnapping, and was awaiting arraignment in Bronx Criminal Court Saturday morning. Information for his lawyer was not immediately available.
On Friday morning, missing-person flyers for Alcantara were posted throughout the building, including on the door of the fifth-floor apartment that neighbors said she shared with her boyfriend. Two NYPD officers stood outside the unit and confirmed that it was being investigated as a crime scene.
Elvin Toribio, who lives in the apartment directly downstairs, said he heard what sounded like furniture being moved in Alcantara’s unit early Sunday morning.
“It lasted for like 10 or 15 minutes,” he said in Spanish. “I thought the neighbor is cleaning. After that, I didn’t hear anything, no screams, nothing.”
Toribio said that on Monday, he watched Alcantara’s boyfriend and pastors from her church put up the flyers around the building. Toribio added that the boyfriend seemed calm, and that the boyfriend said at the time he did not know where Alcantara had gone.
“It really hit me hard,” said Toribio, who described her as a quiet but friendly neighbor and avid churchgoer. “She was a young woman, with an empowered life.”
Pamela Alcantara is seen in a photo posted on her Facebook profile and shared by police in their missing-person search.
A GoFundMe campaign posted by Alcantara’s brother, Isaac Lopez, had raised more than $2,000 by Friday morning. He wrote that the funds would help their mother bring Alcantara’s body to the Dominican Republic, where their family is from.
Police on Friday were also investigating the death of a 41-year-old woman they said officers found unresponsive on the roof of a Bronx building on River Avenue, near Yankee Stadium, around 7:30 p.m. Thursday. They said she had body trauma from an apparent fall and was pronounced dead on the scene.
The city medical examiner’s office was working to determine her cause of death, and police have not publicly identified her.
This story has been updated with additional information.
