Police are working to piece together what happened to a woman who was apparently stabbed to death in an Upper Manhattan apartment and a man who was found dead nearby.
The discoveries were made around 8 a.m. Tuesday. Police were called about a man in his 40s lying atop a second-floor landing by a building on Wadsworth Avenue, in the Washington Heights neighborhood.
Officers soon noticed what seemed to be blood on a sixth-floor railing. They found the roughly 50-year-old woman in a bedroom in a nearby apartment. Police say she had what appeared to be stab wounds.
Both people were pronounced dead at the scene. Their names haven't been released by police, but a friend of the woman identified her as Yuberkis Paulino.
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"She was my best friend in my work," said a tearful Joana Fernandez, who worked with Paulino at a day care in the same building.
Paulino was a new grandmother who had just finished celebrating a festive holiday season, and her two adult daughters lived in the apartment building. The man found dead was her ex-boyfriend, Pablo Castro, according to family members.
"He was very, very jealous, she told me. Very jealous," said Domingo De Los Santos, Paulino's former brother-in-law, adding that Castro had recently moved out of apartment.
Police are exploring whether the deaths might have stemmed from domestic violence.
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