Cypress Hills murder suicide: Luz Espinal Brooklyn woman shot dead by controlling boyfriend who then fatally shot self. Grappling with the death of a popular mom.
A man shot dead a much adored mother in the head before turning the gun on himself during a murder-suicide in Brooklyn, according to cops.
Officers responded to a 911 call at 4:45 p.m. Friday at a first-floor apartment on Logan Street, near Etna Street in Cypress Hills, at the Logans Arms building, where they found Luz Espinal, 43, and a 40-year-old man both deceased with gunshot wounds to their heads. A gun was recovered near the dead man, cops said.
‘Popular’ mom dead in ‘very sad’ NYC murder-suicide shooting: sources https://t.co/bDm1SzsIKU pic.twitter.com/IfNEPBwmaD
— New York Post (@nypost) February 17, 2024
‘I never liked the guy. He wasn’t friendly, he was weird,’
‘It looks like a murder-suicide,’ an NYPD spokesman said during a Saturday afternoon press conference. An autopsy had yet to confirm the nature of the deaths the nydailynews reported.
The identity of the gunman was being withheld pending family notification, the spokesman said.
Espinal was a former home care aide and mother to two grown sons and a 7-year-old girl, who was living in the first-floor apartment where the bloodshed occurred, according to neighbors and the building’s superintendent.
They claimed Espinal recently started dating a man who was ‘very controlling’ — to the point that he made her scrub all her social media.
‘It’s very sad, we are all like a family in this building,’ building Santos Araujo told the nypost.
The super said Espinal was a ‘very happy lady’ and much adored by the building occupants while the man ‘seemed anti-social…,’
‘I never liked the guy. He wasn’t friendly, he was weird,’ Araujo added.
In the grips of controlling love interest
Araujo said Espinal left her daughter in school Friday and Espinal’s sister called him from the Dominican Republic asking if he would check in on her [Espinal] because she could not ‘get in touch.’
Neither Araujo nor his wife, who knocked on Espinal’s apartment front door, could find the woman — but her dog could be heard crying inside.
‘I told my wife, something is not looking too nice. Then my wife told me her son is coming this way. He come to the windows, and that’s how he found out the situation. It’s very sad. They called the police,’ Araujo said.
The couple had been together for just a few months, he added, noting the once ‘very happy lady’ who used to play karaoke in her apartment wasn’t the same.
‘She was very popular. After she met this guy, she changed a lot,’ said the super, who noticed Espinal, who usually loved to play music, stopped doing so in December.
On Saturday, a small memorial was placed near the victim’s apartment with candles burning.
