MOM SICK OVER SLAY
‘Like a bad dream’ that son accused of killing neighbor
When a troubled Bronx man was thrown out of his mother’s apartment, he found refuge at the home of a family friend — and self-styled gigolo — in the same building.
He returned that kindness by gunning down the kindhearted neighbor in the hallway of their building during an argument over marijuana, police and relatives said Wednesday.
After 3 ½ weeks on the run, Isaiah Vasquez, 24, turned himself into police on Tuesday for the Nov. 5 murder of Almalik Lee.
“I cannot believe this, it’s like a bad dream,” Vasquez’s mother, who wished not to be named, told the Daily News. “I’m leaning on God, but a part of me wants to die right now.
“I never raised my kids to be like that,” she said.
As they try to wrap their heads around the bloody killing and arrest, Vasquez’s mother and her boyfriend were battling conflicting emotions: concern over the young man they raised and outrage that he allegedly killed the kindhearted neighbor who opened his heart and apartment door.
“He didn’t deserve that,” the boyfriend, who also didn’t wish to be named, said about Lee. “He was a good soul, a good man.”
Lee, 39, moved to the Bronx from Texas and promoted an online escort service called “Exotic Bluestocking” where he offered massages to women.
“Prices vary,” he wrote on Facebook. “For all the ladies [who] just want hang out n’ chill no strings attached.
“I don’t want to be ur man, just a Friend n lover that’s all,” he wrote in 2019. “If u ready to get away from all the bull n come over to my place… for a vacation from all drama.”
Lee suffered from a mental illness and didn’t always take his medication, but he had a big heart and helped those in need, the boyfriend and Vasquez’s mother said.
“He did nothing but good deeds, [but] he was a little wacky,” the boyfriend said. “He had his ways, he wasn’t mentally 100% stable.”
The mother said the shooting was the culmination of a downward spiral for Vasquez, who had been kicked out of the New Jersey apartment he shared with his wife and 1-year-old son in early October. The mother said she then kicked Vasquez out of her 15th-floor apartment on Oct. 27 after an argument nearly turned violent.
Lee kindly welcomed Vasquez into his apartment on the second floor.
“He was a good person,” Vasquez’s mother said. “We always checked on [Lee] because we worried about him, he’s alone.”
Lee and Vasquez had been living together for a week when the argument over weed allegedly escalated. Vasquez was trying to rob Lee’s weed stash during the caught-on-camera shooting, police said.
Vasquez is accused of blasting the victim three times in the chest in the hallway outside Lee’s apartment on Rodman Place near West Farms Road about 1:40 a.m., police said.
Lee collapsed in a pool of his own blood. EMS rushed him to St. Barnabas Hospital, but he could not be saved.
Vasquez is charged with murder and gun possession. His arraignment was pending in Bronx Criminal Court.
Vasquez’s mother couldn’t process that her son was the suspected shooter.
“It’s just too much,” she said. “I don’t know what to do, I can’t function, I haven’t eaten, I haven’t slept.”