MURDER AT THE FISH MARKET
Steps from Sarah Jessica Parker’s shoe store, a Momofuku outpost and multimillion-dollar luxury apartments, an abandoned eyesore languishing in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge became a disabled teenager’s tomb.
Sometime during the last weekend of February, 19-year-old Rosalee Sanchez was bludgeoned with a shovel and a metal pipe, stabbed more than nine times and strangled with a piece of rope inside the old Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan, prosecutors said. Her battered and bruised body was wrapped in plastic garbage bags and tape, covered in a metal sheet and left to rot for more than a week.
On Saturday morning, her boyfriend discovered the corpse. “My wife! My wife! They killed my wife!” the man cried as Sanchez’s remains were removed from the city-owned blight, according to a police source who was there.
A trio of out-of-state vagrants who’d been living in the long-neglected warehouse — Austin Boehm, 25; Christian Mercado, 20, and Amber Wilson, 33 — admitted to the crime and were arrested. Boehm stabbed and beat Sanchez, Mercado clobbered her with the shovel and strangled her and Wilson worked in vain to hide the savagery, prosecutors said. “I was there and Austin and The Beast told me to wrap up her body with the tape and the plastic, and then I put a metal sheet over her body,” Wilson told police in an apparent reference to Mercado, according to her criminal complaint.
To locals, the group was a raucous bunch, known for shoplifting, drug use and general delinquency. But to Sanchez, they were newfound friends. “Every time when she used to talk to me I said, ‘Come back [home]’ and she said, ‘Mommy, I’m OK, I’m with my friends,’ ” Sanchez’s mother, Iris Garcia, told The Post. “[She said] they were helping her and they’d look out for her, and I told her, ‘No,
Rosalee, you don’t know these people. Not everybody is your friend.’ But that’s the kind of heart my daughter had: She couldn’t see the bad in people. She was too innocent,” Garcia, 52, said between choked sobs.
“She thought everybody was her friend, she trusted everybody . . . she didn’t deserve for these people to do this to her.”
Sanchez, a New Jersey native, suffered from a learning disability and had the mentality of a 14year-old, Garcia explained.
She left her mother’s home in Newark about two months ago to join a program for troubled teenagers after depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies left her hospitalized multiple times.
“It was a struggle for 18 years. I always tried to keep her safe. I used to take her to take therapies. She used to see a psychiatrist, but when she turned 18, she didn’t want anybody helping her,” the mom recounted.
When Sanchez decided she no longer wanted to be in the program, she left to live on the streets with her boyfriend “Ghost” in the Big Apple.
“She just wanted to be out there in Manhattan,” Garcia cried as she clutched a photo of Sanchez,