A woman due to take a trip home to California was stabbed by her boyfriend and left to die in the bathtub of their East Harlem apartment, police sources said Thursday.
Melanie Woods, 33, was found dead in the tub inside her home on Second Ave. near E. 117th St. about 6 pm Tuesday after a panicked friend called police asking them to check on her. Woods was planning a trip to California but she missed her flight, the worried friend told investigators, according to a police source.
Woods worked at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation before moving to New York, a friend and colleague wrote on Facebook.
“When she left to pursue a degree at Columbia University, I made her promise to me that we’d have the chance to work together again,” the friend wrote. “To know that her death was an act of violence likely committed by an ex is beyond comprehensible.”
The victim’s boyfriend, Candido Rodriguez, was seen in the apartment building hours before the gray discovery was made, police said.
When Woods failed to answer messages, her friend and Woods’ mother used an app to track her cell phone. The app showed the phone was still in Woods’ apartment. Fearing the worst, they called police, police sources said.
Woods was found in her bathtub with stab wounds to her upper body and several cuts on her neck, police said.
Woods’ family have been inconsolable since learning about the young woman’s death.
“I go from tears to shock to tears to shock,” Woods’ sister-in-law, Kelly Woods, told the Daily News. “She was just such a loved individual. “She was so well loved in her community.”
Rodriguez, 51, was seen in the building Tuesday morning, neighbors told police. Cops caught up with him Thursday and charged him with murder and weapon’s possession.
Neighbor Urijah Pimentel, who shared a wall with Woods, heard raised voices coming from the victim’s apartment the night before her body was discovered. The argument was so loud it interrupted a work-related phone call, Pimentel remembered.
“I thought it was an action movie. Like fighting, arguing,” Pimentel, 27, said, assuming the argument was on Woods’ television. “I kind of stopped and was like, ‘What the heck is that?’”
The noises stopped in short order. The next morning, Pimentel’s wife heard what she thought was “furniture moving” in Woods’ apartment along with louder voices.
Neither thought anything more of it until Tuesday night when their floor was swarming with cops.
“We heard (the police) break down the door and then break down another door,” she remembered. “It’s one of those things where you put it all together and you’re like, ‘Oh.’”
Cops had trouble gaining access to the victim’s apartment because a table had been positioned to block a door, NBC 4 New York reported.
Woods had lived in the building for about a year, Pimentel said. In hindsight, the neighbor wished she had taken action when she heard the argument.
“When you live in a big city there’s so many things to explain it before you sit there and go, ‘Is something going on?’” she said. “Sometimes it just doesn’t hurt to just send a call out, just to say, ‘Hey, something sounds weird.’”
Other neighbors also heard the loud argument, as well as someone slamming the door as they left Woods’ apartment, police sources said.
Pimentel and her wife bonded with Woods over their love of dogs: Woods was fostering a dog in the apartment when she died. The dog, Delilah, was found unharmed.
“It’s a shame to be honest because she was a very nice person, very cool,” Pimentel said about her neighbor. “You could tell she was a good dog mom. (My wife) trusted Melanie implicitly in that regard.”
Pimentel said Rodriguez appeared to be living with Woods and gave neighbors a “weird vibe.”
“He told us that (Woods) was his wife and then he kind of made strange advances flirtatiously toward my wife,” Pimentel said. “It was just so contrasting to Melanie because she was so nice.”
Rodriguez would wait for Pimentel’s spouse to leave the apartment to walk their dogs so he could open his door and flirt with Pimentel’s wife.
“There has to be decorum,” Pimentel said, remembering how uncomfortable he made her wife feel. “It came to a point where I would make sure I was always with her. “It was just one of those things where you got to be careful.”
Rodriguez’s arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court was pending Thursday.
Woods was “someone who always rooted for the underdog and loved to see people thrive and succeed,” relatives said.
“She was a vibrant soul who brought out the best in anyone around her, this we will never forget,” Melanie’s brother Stephen Woods wrote in a GoFundMe seeking donations to pay for her to be cremated and returned to their mother in California. “In this difficult time we are left to remember the wonderful times and memories. By holding onto these memories we can all remember her in our own way.”
