Bx. brutality on steroids
Ex-con mercilessly beat girlfriend in empty office for 3 days: cops
Flanked by a handful of banks, fast-food eateries and the occasional doctor’s office, the small three-story Bronx office building on E. 149th St. was as unremarkable as a neighborhood workspace could be — until Deshawn Owens turned it into a chamber of horrors, workers and police allege.
The violent ex-con sneaked his 28-year-old girlfriend into one of the empty offices, where he bound her to a chair and mercilessly beat her for three days, cops said.
“Everything was all over the place. It was a mess,” a 59-year building worker who saw the grisly scene told the Daily News. “There was blood on the walls. It was splattered.”
That was just one of the horrors police have linked to Owens. Another was a rotting male corpse found in the trash at his apartment in East Tremont. It’s unclear what if any charges might be brought in that case, as cops were still trying Saturday to determine how the man found in the trash had died.
Employees of the office building near Third Ave. in Mott Haven where Owens allegedly tortured his girlfriend showed up for work on the morning of Jan. 19 to find a cop at the front door, holding them back.
“We have a hostage situation,” the cop said, stunning everyone.
A short time later, Owens, 30, was brought out in handcuffs. EMS took his bloodied and battered girlfriend out in a collapsible wheelchair, her chest and legs covered with a blanket.
“It looked like she was definitely beaten,” said another building worker, who would identify himself only as Tim. “She had some bruising and her face was swollen. She was definitely there, but not there. She looked very stressed. It was very sad. She was all messed up.”
When workers were allowed into the building, they found crime scene investigators going through a vacant second-floor office.
“I was nauseous from seeing all the blood,” said the 59-year-old building worker. “You could tell they had food, it was like they were living there. Food, junk food, and garbage.”
The the 59-year-old worker left the horror show only to find another in the third-floor bathroom. “I discovered that,” the worker said. “It was the same way. Just blood. Full of food. Blood on the walls.”
Owens, who has a history of robbing his ex-girlfriends and a tattooed Superman logo on his chest, faces assault, strangulation, unlawful imprisonment and other charges for allegedly kidnapping his girlfriend and repeatedly brutalizing her, cops said.
A day after Owens was in custody — Saturday, Jan. 20 — cops went to the fifth-floor apartment on E. 179th St. near Mapes Ave. in East Tremont where the couple lived and found a man’s decomposing body wrapped in plush fabric and stuffed inside a trash can, cops said.
The corpse was so badly decomposed a cause of death has yet to be established, a police source said.
Bronx prosecutors said that beginning Dec. 1, Owens refused to let his girlfriend leave the E. 179th St. apartment, tied her up with cable wires, and beat her.
On Jan. 17, he took her out of the East Tremont apartment and sneaked her into the Mott Haven office building.
The empty second-floor office where Owens wanted to put himself and the woman was locked.
So Owens went into a women’s rest room and crawled out a window onto a small balcony facing the windows to the vacant office. The office windows were not locked, said the building worker.
“It was just carelessness,” the worker said. “It seemed like he knew this office was empty and just went straight there.
“I was here Thursday night. It just creeped me out when I heard what happened,” the worker said. “I didn’t hear anything, but they probably were quiet.”
On Friday, Jan. 19, cops got a 911 call about an assault at the E. 149th St. building and found Owens and his girlfriend in the blood-spattered office.
The woman suffered two black eyes, several broken ribs, a punctured pancreas and internal bleeding during the assault. She also had several broken hand bones, cops said.
Owens is also accused of threatening her with a knife and a broom handle.
“He brutally attacked her every day, by beating her with wooden sticks, broomsticks, whatever he could,” one of the victim’s cousins told the Daily News last week.
“She said he just beat on her everyday. She didn’t really get into details on what led him to do that. He was making her try to do awful things, like asking people for money when he needed it,” the cousin continued.
“And regardless if she did it or not, he would still just beat her. So inside his apartment he kept her hostage. And we don’t know why.”
Detectives are trying to determine if the woman knew that the corpse was in the apartment they shared, a police source with knowledge of the case said.