BURN IN HELL, ‘DEVIL’
Ex-con in horrific beating slay of gal pal & her 14-yr.-old son jumps in front of train
The boyfriend suspected of fatally bludgeoning a Bronx mom and her 14-year-old son jumped to his death in front of a Metro-North train, police said on Monday.
Hector Cruz, 51, was killed by the northbound train at the Hartsdale, Westchester County, station at 9:45 a.m. Sunday. Six hours later, police received 911 calls that Marisol Ortiz, 51, and her teenage son Alanche Del Orbe had been beaten to death in their Bronx apartment at 185th St. at Southern Blvd. in Belmont.
Ortiz’s 21-year-old daughter, Chantal Del Orbe, discovered their bodies after returning home from a night at a friend’s place, relatives said.
The distraught daughter came upon her brother’s body the day before he would have turned 15. She hung a birthday banner over a memorial of photographs of Alanche outside their building Monday. She sang a somber “Happy Birthday” before bursting into tears.
“He was sweet all the time,” she said of Alanche. “It was all love in that house.”
But then it turned into a horrific crime scene.
Both victims suffered head trauma. Alongside their bodies was an exercise weight police believe was the murder weapon. Investigators think Ortiz may have also been stabbed in the head, sources said. An autopsy will determine the cause of death.
Grieving friends and family of Ortiz and Alanche told the Daily News that they had no doubt Cruz was the killer. They shared photos of him on Facebook and called for justice.
“Damn you a thousand times, damn you because you killed her,” Emiluz Ortiz wrote on Facebook.
“Go in peace my aunt with my nephew. Wow, I feel so powerless why do things like this have to happen. My God. Mourning. What a great loss.”
Marisol Ortiz’s brother, Addy Taveras, wrote on Facebook: “This damn man killed my sister and nephew. Spread the photo so that the full weight of justice falls on this monster.”
Cruz completed a sevenyear sentence in 2016 for first-degree assault, according to Department of Corrections records.
“He was a bit jealous. He was strange. He would look through (Ortiz’s) phone but he was never aggressive. He always said he wanted the family united,” Chantal Del Orbe said. “He never really convinced me. Days before he was acting strange.”
Cruz competed with Ortiz’s children for attention, Taveras said. “He wanted Marisol to pay more attention to him than the kids.”
“In front of people he was nice but he turned out to be a dog. He had a crazy man’s face,” he said.
Bronx resident J. Newman said he’d let Cruz, who had
been homeless since getting out of prison, stay in his apartment.
“There were a lot of things that bothered him. His mother passed away when he was incarcerated and he never had the time to grieve. He had no apartment so that was another thing that bothered him. He needed people to talk to,” said Newman, 74, who is blind.
There was no other sympathy for Cruz.
“They’re going to cremate the bodies because they were told that their faces were so brutally beaten, you can’t see who they were. You can’t see their faces,” Ortiz’s cousin Haydee Leonardo told The News.
Their ashes would likely be sent to the Dominican Republic, where the father of Alanche and Chantal lives, Taveras said. Leonardo said her father wants Chantal to go to the Dominican Republic. “He’s very devastated,” he said.
The superintendent of the building, Daniel Oliveras, was among those who thought Cruz was the killer. He said the boyfriend often stayed with Ortiz and always “looked nervous.”
“This guy is a devil!” Oliveras said of Cruz. “He’s a bad character. A really bad guy.”
Oliveras said he had become close with Ortiz and that his son played basketball and baseball with Alanche.
Ortiz paid the rent on time, worked hard and made sure her kids studied, he said.
Oliveras said the boyfriend was such a creep that his 12-year-old son didn’t want to sleep because he was scared Cruz might be coming back.
Alanche’s friend, Jancarlos Martinez, 18, who went to the same school as the teen and thought of him as a “little brother,” said his buddy was always telling jokes.
“Even if he was sad inside you couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter how hard things were he would always put up a smile,” Martinez said.
The two attended high school at the Evander Childs Educational Campus, and Alanche “wanted to make it out of the hood” and play baseball,” Martinez said.
Friends of Alanche stopped by the memorial outside of the building to pay their respects.
“It’s hard dying one day before your birthday, not for him but for his family and friends,” Randy Martinez said. “He knows we love him.”
Another friend, Diannibel Cedano, 15, said Alanche never mentioned trouble at home.
“It was rare that he spoke about his family and what was happening with him, but aside from that, we never saw Alanche sad or saying he had a problem,” Diannibel said. “He was always smiling, dancing. He was always saying, ‘I want to get my license, I want to play ball.’ ”
One of Alanche’s middle school teachers from the Academy of Language and Technology, Bianell De La Cruz, said the killing had impacted the entire high school. “The fact that he’s gone, under those conditions, it got all of us. He was a good student, a good kid. And now he’s no longer with us.”