‘DON’T KNOW WHY’
Grief over senseless B'klyn ax slay
The grieving family of a young mother hacked to death in a Brooklyn ax attack was left searching for answers on a painful Easter morning, one day after the gruesome slaying.
“I don’t know why he did it,” Elsa Collazo said, struggling to make sense of career criminal Jerry Brown’s alleged brutal attack that left her granddaughter, Savannah Rivera, dead and Brown’s exgirlfriend clinging to life. “Maybe he don’t want no witnesses.”
Wielding a yellow-handled fiberglass ax still bearing its price tag, Brown (inset), 34, allegedly chopped away at Rivera and Angela Valle inside Valle’s Bushwick Houses apartment early Saturday.
Brown — known on social media as the “Grim Creepa” and, in a nod to the California penal code for homicide, “Mr. 187” — nearly decapitated Rivera, 20, while leaving his 21year-old ex clinging to life, authorities allege.
Two of Rivera’s aunts, their faces wet from tears, at first refused to speak to a reporter. They sat sobbing quietly in the living room of Collazo’s third-floor walk-up as a nightgownclad Collazo mopped the kitchen floor and recalled going to the morgue Saturday to see her granddaughter’s mangled body.
But one aunt couldn’t hold back her anger and eventually exclaimed, “They are going to kill him! He’s dead! He better stay in jail! That motherf--ker!”
Meanwhile Sunday, Valle’s neighbors said they didn’t hear anything from her apartment as the women were hacked — while Valle’s 4-year-old daughter slept soundly in a back room.
“I didn’t hear no fighting,” said one man from the building, who refused to give his name. “I just saw the blood in the hall. The hall was covered in blood. I just ran back in and waited for the cops.”
Brown, charged with murder, attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon, spent his Easter in Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, where he is undergoing psychiatric evaluation, according to police sources.
Valle remained at Elmhurst Hospital in critical but stable condition.