A man fatally shot a woman in the head before turning the gun on himself during a murder-suicide in Brooklyn, according to police.
Officers responding to a 911 call at 4:45 p.m. Friday at a first-floor apartment on Logan Street, near Etna Street in Cypress Hills, found Luz Espinal, 43, and the 40-year-old man both with gunshot wounds to their heads, police said. A gun was recovered near the dead man, cops said.
“It looks like a murder-suicide,” an NYPD spokesman said Saturday afternoon, noting an autopsy would still be performed.
The identity of the gunman is being withheld pending family notification, the spokesman said.
Espinal was a former home care aide and mother to two grown sons and a 7-year-old girl, who was living in the first-floor apartment where the bloodshed occurred, according to neighbors and the building’s super.
They claimed Espinal recently started dating a man who was “very controlling” — to the point that he made her scrub all her social media.
“It’s very sad, we are all like a family in this building,” lamented superintendent Santos Araujo, who said Espinal was a “very happy lady” but the man “seemed anti-social…I never liked the guy. He wasn’t friendly, he was weird.”
Araujo said Espinal left her daughter in school Friday and Espinal’s sister called him from the Dominican Republic asking if he would check in on her [Espinal] because she could not “get in touch.”
Neither Araujo nor his wife, who knocked on Espinal’s apartment front door, could find the woman — but her dog could be heard crying inside.
“I told my wife, something is not looking too nice. Then my wife told me her son is coming this way. He come to the windows, and that’s how he found out the situation. It’s very sad. They called the police,” Araujo said.
The couple had been together for just a few months, he added, noting the once “very happy lady” who used to play karaoke in her apartment wasn’t the same.
“She was very popular. After she met this guy, she changed a lot,” said the super, who noticed Espinal, who usually loved to play music, stopped doing so in December.
On Saturday, a small memorial was placed near the victim’s apartment with candles burning.