BUTCHERED BEAUTY’S GRIM PAST
Bronx chop victim witnessed mom’s gruesome murder when she was 12
A young woman who saw her pregnant mother butchered in front of her 12 years ago became the victim of a horrific murder — killed by a man who beat her to death, then dismembered her body and stuffed the parts in plastic trash bags scattered across two Bronx parks, according to police and the doomed woman’s family.
Lisa Marie Velasquez was just 12 years old when she and her two younger siblings, David and Vanessa, saw their mom’s ex-boyfriend drag her into her bedroom and stab her to death as his current girlfriend held her down.
On Friday, police found two bags of body parts in Crotona Park belonging to Velasquez. Cops found three more bags at Barretto Point Park in Hunts Point on Tuesday night, and soon determined the remains belonged to the 24-year-old Velasquez, who died from a blow to the head.
“I’m trying to find a way to tell her grandmother. It’s not been easy for us,” Velasquez’s aunt Jacqueline Perez told the Daily News on Wednesday.
Velasquez’s grandmother, Iris Ginel, took custody of Velasquez and her siblings after their mom, Marilyn Ginel, was stabbed, strangled and beaten to death in her apartment.
Ginel, 37, was nine months pregnant, and the killer, Robert Coakley, warned the children, “If you tell anybody I killed your mother, I’ll kill you,” police sources said at the time.
Coakley was convicted of murder and is serving 25 years to life in prison.
“Lisa witnessed it. After that, my mother took custody of the kids,” Perez said. “She’s sick. She can’t walk. She never recovered from her daughter being murdered.”
As for Velasquez’s death, the family is at a loss for who might have killed her, though detectives have told them a suspect is in custody.
“We don’t know who he is. We don’t know who she was seeing. We don’t know who she was hanging out with,” Perez said. “They got one person arrested. The police told me she was dead before he dismembered her.”
A police spokesman couldn’t confirm any arrests Wednesday night.
Velasquez was still alive as of Aug. 21, when she last left her apartment in the Melrose Houses and never returned, police sources said.
“She came to my mother’s house. She grabbed her bag. She left in a rush. She said she had to help a friend who was in danger. And then she ran out,” Perez said.
Another aunt living in her building reported her missing a day later, sources said.
Her family posted frantic messages on Facebook, asking one another to check the airports to see if she’d left town, and repeatedly posting her photo.
“The type of animal who would do this to another human being … she was tortured,” Perez said. “She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve to die this way. Whether she was a good girl or a bad girl, she didn’t deserve this.”
Cops Wednesday zeroed in on a home on Longfellow Ave. in Longwood where it’s believed the victim was cut apart. The home is less than a mile and a half from Crotona Park, where her head and torso was found.
A next-door neighbor on Longfellow Ave. said she saw a man climbing through a window, then heard a woman’s desperate screams on Aug. 8.
“There was a guy going through the window and she was screaming,” said the neighbor, who identified herself only as Lizannette, 20. “All I know is she was screaming ‘You gonna kill me! You gonna kill me!’ ”
She didn’t see the man’s face, but said he was about 30 and had light brown skin.
It’s not clear if the incident is related to Velasquez’s murder.