Nurse slain by strangler
Kin tell of suspicious stranger on phone
A nurse was strangled inside her Queens home, police said Wednesday — and her younger brother said he had an encounter with the killer a day before discovering her body, before anyone knew she was dead.
Samantha Stewart, 29, had cuts and bruises on her face when she was found by her brother and father in the apartment on 145th Road near 167th Ave. in Springfield Gardens just after 9 p.m. Tuesday, cops said.
A day before the made the grim discovery, Stewart’s brother, Dewayne Stewart, 23, tried to get her on the phone, only to be greeted by a strange man’s voice.
“This guy picked up her phone. He told me he had her phone by accident and he had her car keys that she had left (to see) our younger brother. So I told him I would come for them,” Stewart said.
“I got there and he came downstairs he gave me the keys. I never met him before. He was kind of fidgety, but I wasn’t taking it that serious. He told me his name under his breath, but it was muffled. I can’t remember it. I didn’t think anything of it.”
He picked up the car and left, and when he returned with it Tuesday, at at about 5:20 p.m., no one answered the door. He slipped the car keys under the doormat, but something seemed off, so he returned with his dad a few hours later. He broke into a window using a butter knife, and found her dead, wrapped in a blanket.
Her dad, Kenneth Stewart, said he believes the killer was someone she was seeing.
“She was dating someone and he didn’t want to break it off,” he said. “I know the guy was [in the house.] He was there up to the end. I know he answered my daughter’s phone. When my son [Dwayne] called, he answered.”
Garfield Barrows, 60, a neighbor, said he heard strange rumbling about 1:30 p.m. Tuesday. “I thought, what are those kids up to?” he said, speculating later it may have been a sign of a struggle.
“If she just screamed, I would’ve known, I would’ve helped her,” he said. “But she didn’t scream. Probably she was trying to get away, it seemed like, and the person grabbed her back.”
Her father said she was wrapped in a blanket, badly beaten. Her teeth were missing, and a pool of blood had formed around her head.
“It’s something that will stay with you for the rest of your life. I never expect to see my daughter in that condition — lifeless body, wrapped up into like a piece of dirty rag,” Kenneth Stewart said. “I hope to God that someone will find that person. I’m helpless right now.”
Stewart graduated nursing school a year ago, her family said.
Another neighbor, Nailah Bernard, 17, who has lived on the block for 10 years, said Kenneth Stewart stopped by her house Tuesday night and asked if her security cameras worked.
“He came last night over here and told us, ‘I just found my daughter dead upstairs,’ ” she said. “He was pacing back and forth. He wasn’t even able to talk, that’s how scary it was. He was losing his mind – like any father would be losing his mind,”
As for the strange man, Nailah said, “Nobody knows him … Nobody had ever met this guy.”
The medical examiner’s office said the nurse was strangled.
“It was vicious,” Nailah said of the slaying. “Nobody deserves that. There’s nothing anybody can do on this earth to deserve how bad it was.”
The teen said she would often see Stewart walking down the block in scrubs on her way to work. Her father has owned the house for a number of years and rents it out to tenants, she said.
“This person is an animal and I hope I could catch him or someone else would catch him,” Kenneth Stewart said. “My daughter suffered before she died … when I found her she was stone cold a day later. That monster overpowered her and killed her.”