Never got back to Calif.
Stabbed to death in East Harlem before trip; boyfriend held
A woman due to take a trip home to California was stabbed by her boyfriend and left to die in the bathtub of their East Harlem apartment, police sources said Thursday.
Melanie Woods, 33, was found dead in the tub inside her home on Second Ave. near E. 117th St. around 6 p.m. Tuesday after a panicked friend called police asking them to check on her. Woods was planning a trip to California but missed her flight, the worried friend told investigators, according to a police source.
“It was known they were having problems,” a law enforcement source said of Woods and her boyfriend.
According to social media posts by friends and an online resume, Woods attended UCLA, worked at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and then received a graduate degree from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She also worked for NYC Test and Trace Corps and at the CDC Foundation’s COVID-19 Emergency Response Corps Workforce.
Woods made a lasting impression at the AIDS Foundation before moving to New York, a friend and colleague wrote on Facebook.
“When she left to pursue a degree at Columbia University, I made her promise me that we’d have the chance to work together again,” the friend wrote. “To know that her death was an act of violence likely committed by an ex is beyond comprehensible.”
The victim’s boyfriend, Candido Rodriguez, was seen in the apartment building hours before the grisly discovery was made, police said.
When Woods failed to answer messages, her friend and Woods’ mother used an app to track her cell phone. The app showed the device was still in Woods’ apartment. Fearing the worst, they called police, sources said.
Woods was found in her bathtub with stab wounds to her upper body and several cuts on her neck, police said.
Her family has been inconsolable since learning about the young woman’s death.
“I go from tears to shock to tears to shock,” Woods’ sister-in-law Kelly Woods told the Daily News. “She was just such a loved individual. She was so well loved in her community.”
Rodriguez, 51, was seen in the building Tuesday morning, neighbors told police. Cops caught up with him Thursday and charged him with murder and weapon possession.
A neighbor who did not want to be named heard raised voices coming from the victim’s apartment the night before her body was discovered. The argument was so loud it interrupted a work-related phone call, the woman remembered.
“I thought it was an action movie. Like fighting, arguing,” said the neighbor, 27, assuming the argument was on Woods’ television. “I kind of stopped and was like, ‘What the heck is that?’ ”
The noises stopped in short order. The next morning, the neighbor’s wife heard what she thought was “furniture moving” in Woods’ apartment, along with more loud voices.
They gave it no further thought until Tuesday night, when their floor was swarming with cops.
“We heard [the police] break down the door and then break down another door,” the neighbor remembered. “It’s one of those things where you put it all together and you’re like, ‘Oh.’ ”
Cops had trouble gaining access to the victim’s apartment because a table had been positioned to block a door, NBC 4 New York reported.
Woods had lived in the building for about a year, said the woman. In hindsight, the neighbor wished she had taken action when she heard the argument.
“When you live in a big city, there’s so many things to explain it before you sit there and go, ‘Is something going on?’” she said. “Sometimes it just doesn’t hurt to just send a call out, just to say, ‘Hey, something sounds weird.’”
Other neighbors also heard the loud argument, as well as someone slamming the door as they left Woods’ apartment, police sources said.
The neighbor and her wife bonded with Woods over their love of dogs: Woods was fostering a dog in the apartment when she died. The dog, Delilah, was found unharmed.
“It’s a shame … because she was a very nice person, very cool,” the neighbor said of Woods. “You could tell she was a good dog mom. [My wife] trusted Melanie implicitly in that regard.”
The woman said Rodriguez appeared to be living with Woods and gave her and other neighbors a “weird vibe.”
“He told us that [Woods] was his wife and then he kind of made weird advances flirtatiously toward my wife,” said the woman. “It was just so contrasting to Melanie because she was so nice.”
Rodriguez would wait for the neighbor’s spouse to leave the apartment to walk their dogs so he could open his door and flirt with the wife.
“There has to be decorum,” said the neighbor, remembering how uncomfortable he made her wife feel. “It came to a point where I would make sure I was always with her. It was just one of those things where you got to be careful.”
Rodriguez’s arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court was pending Thursday.
Woods was “someone who always rooted for the underdog and loved to see people thrive and succeed,” relatives said.
“She was a vibrant soul who brought out the best in anyone around her, this we will never forget,” Melanie’s brother Stephen Woods wrote in a GoFundMe post. “In this difficult time we are left to remember the wonderful times and memories. By holding onto these memories, we can all remember her in our own way.”