‘Helped’ his killer
My son didn’t want susp to be on street: ma
He took in his accused killer out of loyalty and pity.
The demonic death of Christopher Rodriguez on Saturday — his testicles chopped off, his stomach ripped open, his neck slashed — came because longtime friend Aljo Mrkulic needed his help and wanted his love, the victim’s mother, Jacqueline Perez, 47, told the Daily News on Monday.
Mrkulic settled on death, authorities charge.
“They have video of my son being stabbed in the neck and the torso out in the hallway when he ran out to get help,” Perez said. “He had cut off my son’s private parts and cut open his stomach. The detectives told us that.”
“He took him in not even a month ago,” Perez said of her son’s relationship with his accused killer. “My son helped him out with money.”
On Mother’s Day, she recounted, both Rodriguez, 30, and Mrkulic, 31, visited her at her Queens home.
“Aljo wanted to be romantically involved, but my son didn’t feel that way about him,” she said. She doesn’t know what sparked the crazed bloodbath, she added.
“Nobody really knows what went on in that room,” she noted.
Perez said her son knew Mrkulic since high school.
“My son had seen him homeless after his mother threw him out for cursing her out,” Perez said. “He didn’t want to see him on the street.”
But she said Mrkulic wasn’t an actual resident of her son’s ninth-floor East Harlem apartment in the Acadia Gardens housing development on E. 120th St. near First Ave.
Mrkulic wasn’t supposed to be there at all.
“My son wasn’t supposed to have anyone living there with him,” she said. “He’d come in at night so no one would know [Mrkulic] was living here.”
According to neighbors at the Upper East Side building where Mrkulic grew up and where his mother was super, theirs was a chaotic household after the mom kicked out the father of Mrkulic and two siblings.
“From the time they moved in here, when Aljo was about 3, there was always something going on,” former neighbor Bruce Higgins told The News. “He was very mild and friendly and helpful, out of the three children he was probably the nicest one.”
The family moved to Queens 10 years ago, tenants said.
About 4:20 a.m. on Saturday, Mrkulic ran out of Rodriguez’s apartment after setting a blaze — and wildly bit an officer who was trying to get inside.
When firefighters entered, they found Rodriguez butchered, authorities said. Mrkulic is now at Bellevue Hospital under psychiatric evaluation.
“Those officers who got bitten should know that both my son and his friend were HIV-positive,” Perez told The News. “My son has had the virus since he was 14. He told us his friend also was HIV-positive.”
“My son was openly gay,“she said. “He never had any problem with that and neither did our family.”
She said Rodriguez was always bright and optimistic about his future.
“He graduated from Lehman College five years ago,” she said. “He was a business major. He was supposed to start a new job working at Chase opening accounts for people, but then COVID-19 happened.”
“Everybody loved my son,” Perez said. “He always went to parties to dance. He was always taking care of animals. He would even feed cats in the street.”
“He was alive and happy always,” she said. “He was the center of our family.
“We are crushed.”