By Jon Schuppe and Nina Mandell
DNAinfo Reporters/Producers
WASHINGTON HEIGHTS — A 35-year-old woman was found stabbed to death Monday night in the studio apartment of a Volunteers for America housing program on West 165th Street, police said.
Suspicion has turned to the tenant of the seventh-floor apartment, an ex-con who has not been seen by his fellow residents since the weekend. One of those residents, Ruth Adingra, told DNAinfo that staffers informed tenants on Tuesday that the victim had entered the building on Friday with an overnight guest pass but never signed out. Staffers said that they entered the apartment on Monday night after smelling a foul odor, and discovered the body, Adingra said.
A Volunteers of America spokeswoman would not comment.
Police said they were called to the building at 9:46 p.m. Monday and found Irene Alameda stabbed several times in her torso. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
It is not clear how long she’d been dead, or how exactly she died. The medical examiner’s office will try to figure that out in an autopsy on Wednesday.
It is also unclear where Alameda lived. Police said she lived in the building where she was killed. But residents said she did not live there. And a weeping woman who showed up at the scene and described herself as a close friend of Alameda’s said she lived in Harlem.
“She was a beautiful person,” said the friend, who identified herself as Miss Young. She was too upset to say anything more.
The 10-story building, caddie corner from the New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital on Broadway, is known as the Richard F. Salyer House, a “supportive housing project” that provides SRO-style apartments for people who have left the city’s shelter system. The residents include formerly homeless people, victims of domestic violence, people with HIV/AIDS, and ex-cons.
One of those ex-cons, residents said, was the tenant of the apartment where Alameda’s body was found. They didn’t know him by name but as “the fish guy.”
He’d disappear for days on end and return with packages of fish, which he said he’d caught in Staten Island or Long Island, residents said. He sold some of his catch to his fellow tenants.
Adingra said she remembered a meeting five years ago in which tenants were sharing stories of their troubled pasts. The “fish guy” stood up and said he was on parole after spending more than 20 years in prison for murder.
“He said, ‘Thank God I have a place to live,” Adingra said.
