Seventeen cuts lined Alejandro
Uribe’s forearm like tally marks — one for each year he had been with
Nadia Saavedra, his hometown bride from a riverside village in Mexico.
Ms. Saavedra had asked her husband to leave their Bronx apartment in late January, after years of absorbing his abuse. But Mr. Uribe grew obsessed, cutting himself and, after Ms. Saavedra called the police, planting himself in the stairwell and knocking on her door.
A short stay in a hospital psychiatric ward had not kept him from grasping at a vanishing marriage. He took to walking the 400 or so steps from his new home to Ms. Saavedra’s apartment — past a boxing gym, a pharmacy, two churches and a mosque — to watch who came and went. He followed her to Manhattan. He called their 16-year-old son, Uri, almost daily, asking about a man whom he suspected was Ms. Saavedra’s boyfriend.
On Ms. Saavedra’s 34th birthday, March 7, Mr. Uribe waited in the hall outside her second-floor apartment, this time without knocking. When Ms. Saavedra opened the door to take their 11-year-old daughter, Naiyela, to school, he pushed his way past the girl and forced Ms. Saavedra into her bedroom.
She screamed her son’s name, but by the time Uri broke down the door, his mother had been stabbed 13 times. His father, shirtless, moved the 12-inch kitchen knife from one hand to the other before plunging it into his rib cage, forcefully enough to pierce his heart. Mr. Uribe’s dead body crumpled on top of his wife’s.
A neighbor, Celin Feble, 16, heard Ms. Saavedra screaming “Stop, please stop!” She did not understand the gravity of what was happening until she saw Naiyela, weeping, emerge onto the sidewalk with a small black-and-white dog. Uri walked outside with blood all over his hands.
As murders in New York City have fallen to record lows in recent years, domestic killings have come to make up an ever larger part of detectives’ workloads. The cases often take shape out of the Police Department’s view — less than one-third of victims and abusers in domestic homicides have had previous contact with officers — frustrating an agency that is trying to home in on the most violent and vulnerable people.
And, like gang killings and attacks by mentally ill people, domestic murders occur overwhelmingly in poor neighborhoods, where jobs are scarce and seeking help from city agencies is not necessarily the norm. Among those neighborhoods is Mott Haven, part of the 40th Precinct, a two-square-mile trapezoid at the southern tip of the Bronx that is one of several pockets in the city where domestic violence and killings persist.
To understand what drives such violence, The New York Times is documenting each homicide in the 40th Precinct this year. It recorded nine murders in the precinct last year, the 11th highest total among the city’s 77 precincts. It had recorded five as of Saturday, more than all but two other precincts.
Police officers in the South Bronx are trying to break through the shame and fear that often keep victims from reporting abuse, visiting them repeatedly even if they slam the door.
The killing of Ms. Saavedra, who lived in a private, five-story walk-up building, emerged from the same swirl of jealousy, mental instability and silence that makes it difficult for investigators across the city to anticipate domestic violence.
Ms. Saavedra told relatives that she was staying with Mr. Uribe for the sake of their children, despite the years of marital problems. There were no reports to the police of domestic abuse, though she filed for a temporary order of protection with Bronx Family Court on Jan. 29, after Mr. Uribe cut himself and banged on her door; the order was never served.
Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center, where the police brought Mr. Uribe after that episode, released him after less than two days, reflecting the difficulty in decoding risk factors.
At a recent public safety meeting, Sgt. Michael J. LoPuzzo, the commander of the 40th Precinct detective squad, expressed regret that Ms. Saavedra had never told officers she feared for her safety. “Maybe we could have prevented that,” he said.
Even in retrospect, relatives struggled to pinpoint the moment a tumultuous marriage had turned murderous.
“They have many problems, for many years,” said Omar Mendoza, a nephew of Ms. Saavedra’s, with whom Mr. Uribe came to stay after leaving the hospital. “It was nothing new.” But, he added, “I don’t know why he makes this decision.”
Married Young in Mexico
Ms. Saavedra was a doting mother with big hazel eyes and an easygoing manner.
“Chula,” or “cutie,” Ms. Saavedra called one friend. “Princess” was the nickname she gave to a niece.
“She was always smiling, always had happy words — sweet words to say,” said Alejandro, a family friend who played guitar at Ms. Saavedra’s service. He did not provide his last name.
On the eve of her birthday, a Sunday, Ms. Saavedra gathered with her sisters and their children at the apartment of her older sister, Maitec Saavedra, which was filled with the chirping of pet birds. There was a cake and a fruit tart. Nadia Saavedra posted photos from the party online the next day, at 7:13 a.m.
“Take the time to remember that it’s only one more year that God allowed me to be beside my family is the best thing that could have happened to me, thanks sisters,” she wrote in Spanish.
Mr. Uribe, 38, was, by contrast, nearly silent at family gatherings, shutting himself in his room and acting as if no one else was there. A stocky, square-jawed man, he posted photos online of cases of Modelo beer stacked six feet high, and saved his displays of emotion for the makeshift bars where he would meet friends.
The couple had gotten married in their hometown, San Pedro Aytec in Huamuxtitlán, Guerrero, about 100 miles from Acapulco, in the heart of a region plagued by violence from cartels vying for control of the drug trade. Ms. Saavedra, 15 at the time, wore a long white dress. Mr. Uribe, whose mother owned a deli, wore a button-down shirt and jeans. They were joined by about 50 guests, who ate and danced at Mr. Uribe’s family home.
“They did seem like they were very much in love,” said Magali Garcia, a neighbor there who attended the wedding and now lives in Florida.
The couple moved to the South Bronx soon after, joining other Mexican immigrants settling in New York City neighborhoods that, since the 1960s, had been predominantly Puerto Rican, Dominican and African-American. About 12,000 people of Mexican descent now live within the confines of the 40th Precinct, accounting for 13 percent of the population.
Mr. Uribe played on an amateur soccer team called Guerrero, after his home state. A friend, Victor Soto, 55, recalled a weekend pickup game this year, where friends and family barbecued shish kebabs with jalapeños, sipped beers and played — Mr. Uribe, with his shirt off.
“I said, ‘It’s only 57 degrees, you’re going to get sick,’” Mr. Soto said. “We were goofing; he wouldn’t even wait for the summer.”
At other times, Mr. Uribe’s manner was erratic and cold.
“He have days when he’s all right, he knows you,” Mr. Soto said. “The next day, he don’t know you; there were days that he wouldn’t register. Some days I say, ‘Hi,’ he keep walking. Later in the day he say, ‘Sorry I was thinking about something, I had something on my mind.’ ”
A Growing Tension
Ms. Saavedra worked housecleaning jobs to support the family while she cooked for Uri and Naiyela and helped them with their schoolwork. Mr. Uribe preferred getting drunk while bantering about sports with other men, Maitec Saavedra said. In the quieter setting of home, with his wife and children, he grew anxious and lashed out.
“He would get aggressive when she would go home,” Maitec Saavedra said, “because he knew that if he tried to say anything like that in front of them, they would not allow him to behave that way.”
She added, “He didn’t really pay attention to his kids — he didn’t really take care of them, Nadia and the kids.”
Mr. Uribe worked for a time as a laborer around the city. He immersed himself in different brands of machinery and was skilled at fixing engines, so much so that clients would sometimes send cars to pick him up, Mr. Soto said.
But he had stopped working in the early winter, creating more friction in the marriage, Maitec Saavedra said.
Relatives prodded Ms. Saavedra about why she was still with him; she said it was for the children. As in many cases of domestic violence, the couple mostly hid their discord.
A neighbor who lives in Ms. Saavedra’s apartment building in the Bronx said she had heard screaming coming from the apartment on previous occasions. Others said Mr. Uribe was physically abusive. Ms. Saavedra confided to a few friends at a local nonprofit that her husband beat and humiliated her, the group’s founder, Elva Guevara, said.
Mr. Mendoza, Ms. Saavedra’s nephew, said the couple’s problems grew as Mr. Uribe become more emotionally unstable. “He is upset with everybody, with everybody — with no reason,” Mr. Mendoza said.
Near the end of his life, Mr. Uribe became enraged about a relationship that Ms. Saavedra was having with another man, who described the relationship to detectives.
The police said they had not learned of any problems between Ms. Saavedra and Mr. Uribe until Jan. 28, when she called 911 to say he had threatened to kill himself during an argument and had slashed his left forearm.
By the time officers arrived, Mr. Uribe was gone; the officers, concerned about his state of mind, filled out a missing persons report for him. The police had no indication at that point that Mr. Uribe had been violent toward Ms. Saavedra. They wrote a domestic incident report for harassment and an argument.
The next day, around 3 p.m., Ms. Saavedra called the police again. Mr. Uribe was trying to get inside her apartment. Officers arrived and took him to the hospital. He had wrapped his cuts in duct tape, and told the officers that each one represented a year of their relationship.
Ms. Saavedra went to Family Court that day, seeking an order of protection because Mr. Uribe had cut himself during an argument. She was granted a temporary order that would expire on March 9.
Ms. Saavedra alluded to her ordeal on Facebook. “Nobody said it would be easy,” she wrote on Feb. 28. “But with my faith, and this peace that God has given me, I know that better things are coming!!!”
By the morning of March 7, the order had not been served. It indicated Ms. Saavedra needed to “arrange” to have it served by contacting the authorities, but police records show that she never did — a reflection of the onus placed on victims to secure their own protection, say counselors who work with domestic violence victims.
A ‘Very Problematic’ Increase
The pattern of a deepening desperation — Mr. Uribe’s threats to kill himself, his paranoia about a boyfriend — were familiar milestones on the path to domestic homicide.
Domestic homicides — killings that happen within a family or romantic relationship — fell from 76 in 2002 to 63 in 2014 in the city, according to the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence. The decrease was helped in part by an expansion of government options for victims seeking to escape violence. But domestic homicides are much more stubborn than overall murders, which plunged at more than double the rate during the same period. Two-thirds of adult domestic homicide victims from 2002 to 2013 were women, city data show.
“The attitudes that drive domestic violence are deeply embedded in our culture, and are very persistent,” said Liz Roberts, chief program officer at Safe Horizon, a victim services group.
There were 10 intimate-partner homicides in the Bronx last year, the highest for any borough; two were in the 40th Precinct. The borough recorded 75,299 domestic incident reports last year, a rate of 544 per 10,000 residents, compared to 347 per 10,000 residents in Brooklyn, the borough with the second-highest rate.
In the 40th Precinct, domestic-related major crimes, many of them felony assaults, jumped to 84 so far this year from 58 during the same period in 2015 — an increase that Capt. Thomas Alps called “very problematic” at the recent public safety meeting.
People without jobs are more likely to abuse their partners, counselors say, in part because they lose their stake in following social norms. Around 40 percent of domestic homicide victims in New York City from 2004 to 2013 lived in communities with high poverty, compared to about a quarter of the city’s population over all.
Counselors for victims say immigrants are often especially reluctant to seek help — because of their immigration status or an inability to speak English or because domestic-violence standards may have been looser in their home countries.
Despite those hurdles, police officials in the Bronx frequently try for weeks to track down domestic violence suspects. The police have also begun asking victims to sign statements about their abuse immediately to help in cases in which a victim later decides not to cooperate.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has sought to improve coordination between psychiatric hospitals and city agencies, and has put crisis teams in the South Bronx to respond to early signs of violence.
“Nadia Saavedra’s death underscores the urgent need to intervene well before violence happens,” said Sarah Solon, the spokeswoman for the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.
Mourning in Two Countries
Uri was left with cuts and bruises from breaking down his mother’s bedroom door during the attack.
His parents’ bodies were returned to their hometown in Guerrero a week later, after separate viewings in New York.
Ms. Saavedra was given a funeral Mass and burial on March 15 in San Pedro Aytec. That day, her relatives in New York began a novena, nine days of prayer for her soul.
On the third day, more than two dozen mourners gathered at Maitec Saavedra’s East Harlem apartment. Prayers and songs spilled out of the open door amid the chirping of the pet birds. A portrait of Nadia Saavedra hung above a shrine of flowers, candles and balloons.
Women called out to the Virgin Mary, to which the crowd responded, “Ruega por nosotros,” or “Pray for us.”
Mr. Uribe left behind four suicide notes, to his son, daughter, mother and father — all of them dated Feb. 17, nearly three weeks before the killing. He wrote that he was upset by Ms. Saavedra’s new relationship and that he did not want to share her in life or in death; he would take her with him to heaven.
He asked Uri to take care of his sister.
Ms. Saavedra had asked her husband to leave their Bronx apartment in late January, after years of absorbing his abuse. But Mr. Uribe grew obsessed, cutting himself and, after Ms. Saavedra called the police, planting himself in the stairwell and knocking on her door.
A short stay in a hospital psychiatric ward had not kept him from grasping at a vanishing marriage. He took to walking the 400 or so steps from his new home to Ms. Saavedra’s apartment — past a boxing gym, a pharmacy, two churches and a mosque — to watch who came and went. He followed her to Manhattan. He called their 16-year-old son, Uri, almost daily, asking about a man whom he suspected was Ms. Saavedra’s boyfriend.
On Ms. Saavedra’s 34th birthday, March 7, Mr. Uribe waited in the hall outside her second-floor apartment, this time without knocking. When Ms. Saavedra opened the door to take their 11-year-old daughter, Naiyela, to school, he pushed his way past the girl and forced Ms. Saavedra into her bedroom.
She screamed her son’s name, but by the time Uri broke down the door, his mother had been stabbed 13 times. His father, shirtless, moved the 12-inch kitchen knife from one hand to the other before plunging it into his rib cage, forcefully enough to pierce his heart. Mr. Uribe’s dead body crumpled on top of his wife’s.
A neighbor, Celin Feble, 16, heard Ms. Saavedra screaming “Stop, please stop!” She did not understand the gravity of what was happening until she saw Naiyela, weeping, emerge onto the sidewalk with a small black-and-white dog. Uri walked outside with blood all over his hands.
As murders in New York City have fallen to record lows in recent years, domestic killings have come to make up an ever larger part of detectives’ workloads. The cases often take shape out of the Police Department’s view — less than one-third of victims and abusers in domestic homicides have had previous contact with officers — frustrating an agency that is trying to home in on the most violent and vulnerable people.
And, like gang killings and attacks by mentally ill people, domestic murders occur overwhelmingly in poor neighborhoods, where jobs are scarce and seeking help from city agencies is not necessarily the norm. Among those neighborhoods is Mott Haven, part of the 40th Precinct, a two-square-mile trapezoid at the southern tip of the Bronx that is one of several pockets in the city where domestic violence and killings persist.
To understand what drives such violence, The New York Times is documenting each homicide in the 40th Precinct this year. It recorded nine murders in the precinct last year, the 11th highest total among the city’s 77 precincts. It had recorded five as of Saturday, more than all but two other precincts.
Police officers in the South Bronx are trying to break through the shame and fear that often keep victims from reporting abuse, visiting them repeatedly even if they slam the door.
The killing of Ms. Saavedra, who lived in a private, five-story walk-up building, emerged from the same swirl of jealousy, mental instability and silence that makes it difficult for investigators across the city to anticipate domestic violence.
Ms. Saavedra told relatives that she was staying with Mr. Uribe for the sake of their children, despite the years of marital problems. There were no reports to the police of domestic abuse, though she filed for a temporary order of protection with Bronx Family Court on Jan. 29, after Mr. Uribe cut himself and banged on her door; the order was never served.
Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center, where the police brought Mr. Uribe after that episode, released him after less than two days, reflecting the difficulty in decoding risk factors.
At a recent public safety meeting, Sgt. Michael J. LoPuzzo, the commander of the 40th Precinct detective squad, expressed regret that Ms. Saavedra had never told officers she feared for her safety. “Maybe we could have prevented that,” he said.
Even in retrospect, relatives struggled to pinpoint the moment a tumultuous marriage had turned murderous.
“They have many problems, for many years,” said Omar Mendoza, a nephew of Ms. Saavedra’s, with whom Mr. Uribe came to stay after leaving the hospital. “It was nothing new.” But, he added, “I don’t know why he makes this decision.”
Married Young in Mexico
Ms. Saavedra was a doting mother with big hazel eyes and an easygoing manner.
“Chula,” or “cutie,” Ms. Saavedra called one friend. “Princess” was the nickname she gave to a niece.
“She was always smiling, always had happy words — sweet words to say,” said Alejandro, a family friend who played guitar at Ms. Saavedra’s service. He did not provide his last name.
On the eve of her birthday, a Sunday, Ms. Saavedra gathered with her sisters and their children at the apartment of her older sister, Maitec Saavedra, which was filled with the chirping of pet birds. There was a cake and a fruit tart. Nadia Saavedra posted photos from the party online the next day, at 7:13 a.m.
“Take the time to remember that it’s only one more year that God allowed me to be beside my family is the best thing that could have happened to me, thanks sisters,” she wrote in Spanish.
Mr. Uribe, 38, was, by contrast, nearly silent at family gatherings, shutting himself in his room and acting as if no one else was there. A stocky, square-jawed man, he posted photos online of cases of Modelo beer stacked six feet high, and saved his displays of emotion for the makeshift bars where he would meet friends.
The couple had gotten married in their hometown, San Pedro Aytec in Huamuxtitlán, Guerrero, about 100 miles from Acapulco, in the heart of a region plagued by violence from cartels vying for control of the drug trade. Ms. Saavedra, 15 at the time, wore a long white dress. Mr. Uribe, whose mother owned a deli, wore a button-down shirt and jeans. They were joined by about 50 guests, who ate and danced at Mr. Uribe’s family home.
“They did seem like they were very much in love,” said Magali Garcia, a neighbor there who attended the wedding and now lives in Florida.
The couple moved to the South Bronx soon after, joining other Mexican immigrants settling in New York City neighborhoods that, since the 1960s, had been predominantly Puerto Rican, Dominican and African-American. About 12,000 people of Mexican descent now live within the confines of the 40th Precinct, accounting for 13 percent of the population.
Mr. Uribe played on an amateur soccer team called Guerrero, after his home state. A friend, Victor Soto, 55, recalled a weekend pickup game this year, where friends and family barbecued shish kebabs with jalapeños, sipped beers and played — Mr. Uribe, with his shirt off.
“I said, ‘It’s only 57 degrees, you’re going to get sick,’” Mr. Soto said. “We were goofing; he wouldn’t even wait for the summer.”
At other times, Mr. Uribe’s manner was erratic and cold.
“He have days when he’s all right, he knows you,” Mr. Soto said. “The next day, he don’t know you; there were days that he wouldn’t register. Some days I say, ‘Hi,’ he keep walking. Later in the day he say, ‘Sorry I was thinking about something, I had something on my mind.’ ”
A Growing Tension
Ms. Saavedra worked housecleaning jobs to support the family while she cooked for Uri and Naiyela and helped them with their schoolwork. Mr. Uribe preferred getting drunk while bantering about sports with other men, Maitec Saavedra said. In the quieter setting of home, with his wife and children, he grew anxious and lashed out.
“He would get aggressive when she would go home,” Maitec Saavedra said, “because he knew that if he tried to say anything like that in front of them, they would not allow him to behave that way.”
She added, “He didn’t really pay attention to his kids — he didn’t really take care of them, Nadia and the kids.”
Mr. Uribe worked for a time as a laborer around the city. He immersed himself in different brands of machinery and was skilled at fixing engines, so much so that clients would sometimes send cars to pick him up, Mr. Soto said.
But he had stopped working in the early winter, creating more friction in the marriage, Maitec Saavedra said.
Relatives prodded Ms. Saavedra about why she was still with him; she said it was for the children. As in many cases of domestic violence, the couple mostly hid their discord.
A neighbor who lives in Ms. Saavedra’s apartment building in the Bronx said she had heard screaming coming from the apartment on previous occasions. Others said Mr. Uribe was physically abusive. Ms. Saavedra confided to a few friends at a local nonprofit that her husband beat and humiliated her, the group’s founder, Elva Guevara, said.
Mr. Mendoza, Ms. Saavedra’s nephew, said the couple’s problems grew as Mr. Uribe become more emotionally unstable. “He is upset with everybody, with everybody — with no reason,” Mr. Mendoza said.
Near the end of his life, Mr. Uribe became enraged about a relationship that Ms. Saavedra was having with another man, who described the relationship to detectives.
The police said they had not learned of any problems between Ms. Saavedra and Mr. Uribe until Jan. 28, when she called 911 to say he had threatened to kill himself during an argument and had slashed his left forearm.
By the time officers arrived, Mr. Uribe was gone; the officers, concerned about his state of mind, filled out a missing persons report for him. The police had no indication at that point that Mr. Uribe had been violent toward Ms. Saavedra. They wrote a domestic incident report for harassment and an argument.
The next day, around 3 p.m., Ms. Saavedra called the police again. Mr. Uribe was trying to get inside her apartment. Officers arrived and took him to the hospital. He had wrapped his cuts in duct tape, and told the officers that each one represented a year of their relationship.
Ms. Saavedra went to Family Court that day, seeking an order of protection because Mr. Uribe had cut himself during an argument. She was granted a temporary order that would expire on March 9.
Ms. Saavedra alluded to her ordeal on Facebook. “Nobody said it would be easy,” she wrote on Feb. 28. “But with my faith, and this peace that God has given me, I know that better things are coming!!!”
By the morning of March 7, the order had not been served. It indicated Ms. Saavedra needed to “arrange” to have it served by contacting the authorities, but police records show that she never did — a reflection of the onus placed on victims to secure their own protection, say counselors who work with domestic violence victims.
A ‘Very Problematic’ Increase
The pattern of a deepening desperation — Mr. Uribe’s threats to kill himself, his paranoia about a boyfriend — were familiar milestones on the path to domestic homicide.
Domestic homicides — killings that happen within a family or romantic relationship — fell from 76 in 2002 to 63 in 2014 in the city, according to the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence. The decrease was helped in part by an expansion of government options for victims seeking to escape violence. But domestic homicides are much more stubborn than overall murders, which plunged at more than double the rate during the same period. Two-thirds of adult domestic homicide victims from 2002 to 2013 were women, city data show.
“The attitudes that drive domestic violence are deeply embedded in our culture, and are very persistent,” said Liz Roberts, chief program officer at Safe Horizon, a victim services group.
There were 10 intimate-partner homicides in the Bronx last year, the highest for any borough; two were in the 40th Precinct. The borough recorded 75,299 domestic incident reports last year, a rate of 544 per 10,000 residents, compared to 347 per 10,000 residents in Brooklyn, the borough with the second-highest rate.
In the 40th Precinct, domestic-related major crimes, many of them felony assaults, jumped to 84 so far this year from 58 during the same period in 2015 — an increase that Capt. Thomas Alps called “very problematic” at the recent public safety meeting.
People without jobs are more likely to abuse their partners, counselors say, in part because they lose their stake in following social norms. Around 40 percent of domestic homicide victims in New York City from 2004 to 2013 lived in communities with high poverty, compared to about a quarter of the city’s population over all.
Counselors for victims say immigrants are often especially reluctant to seek help — because of their immigration status or an inability to speak English or because domestic-violence standards may have been looser in their home countries.
Despite those hurdles, police officials in the Bronx frequently try for weeks to track down domestic violence suspects. The police have also begun asking victims to sign statements about their abuse immediately to help in cases in which a victim later decides not to cooperate.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has sought to improve coordination between psychiatric hospitals and city agencies, and has put crisis teams in the South Bronx to respond to early signs of violence.
“Nadia Saavedra’s death underscores the urgent need to intervene well before violence happens,” said Sarah Solon, the spokeswoman for the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.
Mourning in Two Countries
Uri was left with cuts and bruises from breaking down his mother’s bedroom door during the attack.
His parents’ bodies were returned to their hometown in Guerrero a week later, after separate viewings in New York.
Ms. Saavedra was given a funeral Mass and burial on March 15 in San Pedro Aytec. That day, her relatives in New York began a novena, nine days of prayer for her soul.
On the third day, more than two dozen mourners gathered at Maitec Saavedra’s East Harlem apartment. Prayers and songs spilled out of the open door amid the chirping of the pet birds. A portrait of Nadia Saavedra hung above a shrine of flowers, candles and balloons.
Women called out to the Virgin Mary, to which the crowd responded, “Ruega por nosotros,” or “Pray for us.”
Mr. Uribe left behind four suicide notes, to his son, daughter, mother and father — all of them dated Feb. 17, nearly three weeks before the killing. He wrote that he was upset by Ms. Saavedra’s new relationship and that he did not want to share her in life or in death; he would take her with him to heaven.
He asked Uri to take care of his sister.
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