A New York apartment building’s former superintendent was accused of robbing and murdering a 74-year-old woman in New York on Sunday. The incident reportedly occurred after he served 20 years in prison for eviscerating a man.
According to New York Post, 47-year-old Lashawn Mackey was held without bail on charges of attempted murder, murder and burglary for killing Maria Hernandez.
Her body was discovered in her apartment on Wednesday by her sister, Maria Terrero, facedown with a gag in her mouth underneath a pile of clothes. Terrero told police she went to the apartment around 9:30 p.m. that day to do a wellness check only to find her sister’s mutilated, lifeless body.
“This is a particularly brutal homicide,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Maxine Rosenthal said to Judge Felicia Mennin at the 47-year-old’s indictment. “She had extensive injuries, including bruising and abrasions to her face, her arms, her back and lacerations to both the vaginal and rectal areas.”
Rosenthal added, “This was clearly a premeditated crime where the defendant went to the basement before the assault to break into the super’s office and dismantle the security surveillance systems located therein.”
Local authorities said the apartment was looted when they arrived. After an autopsy was performed on Hernandez, the pathologist ruled that Hernandez’s cause of death was asphyxia.
Before being accused of Hernandez’s murder, Mackey was ordered to serve 23 years in prison in 2000 for fatally stabbing a man in the middle of the street in Brooklyn 15 times, leaving “his intestines hanging out of his body.”
Mackey was released in 2019 but ended up back in prison in October 2021 for unknown reasons and then released a month later.
On August 16, 2022, Mackey faced grand larceny, burglary and petit larceny charges in Brooklyn, which he pleaded guilty to on December 21, 2022.
Authorities arrested the suspect on Saturday and claimed he was innocent, yelling, “Look for the DNA results at the scene of the crime. Ask them for it!”
His lawyer, Jessica Horani, claimed that her client was innocent. also
