By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Police arrested the ex-con tenant of a Volunteers of America housing program last week on charges that he stabbed a woman to death in his Washington Heights apartment during a domestic dispute.
The alleged killer, Miguel Ramirez, 59, disappeared from the West 165th Street building shortly before the victim’s body was found in his seventh floor apartment last Monday, according to his neighbors. They knew him as “Mike,” or “the fish guy,” because he often went away on fishing trips and sold them his catch.
One neighbor, Ruth Adingra, told DNAinfo that staffers informed tenants that the victim, Irene Alameda, 35, had entered the building on Feb. 26 with an overnight guest pass but never signed out. The staffers said that they entered Ramirez’ apartment three days later after smelling a foul odor, and discovered the body, Adingra said.
When police arrived, they found Irene Alameda, 35, lying dead in the kitchen and a large blood-coated butcher knife in the bathtub, according to a complaint filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Police found Ramirez Wednesday and charged him with murder, police said.
Ramirez told detectives the stabbing was sparked by an argument with Alameda in the early evening of Feb. 28, according to the complaint. She disrespected his mother and sister and slapped him, he said. Then he punched Alameda, grabbed her by the hair and started stabbing her.
When she struggled, he pinned her down on the ground and continued his attack. He ended it by slashing her throat, Ramirez said, according to the complaint.
Ramirez has a criminal past that includes serving 15 years in state prison for shooting and robbing someone in the Bronx in the late 1980s. He was on parole when he started renting apartment 701.
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.
Ramirez completed parole last September.
