Man fatally stabs wife before jumping to death from sixth floor after she tried to evict him from their Manhattan apartment
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK: A 72-year-old man fatally stabbed his estranged wife, 78, before slitting his throat and leaping off to death from the sixth floor of a building on August 18. The man was provoked by his wife's attempt to evict him from their Manhattan apartment.
When the police responded to the scene after receiving reports of a jumper, they found Campo Albuja-Montalvo dead on the pavement outside the couple’s apartment building. Inside their Inwood apartment, investigators found Francia Walsh dead on a couch from multiple stab wounds.
The case is being investigated as a murder-suicide. Eyewitnesses said Albuja-Montalvo bounced off the second-floor balcony before hitting the concrete. Some neighbors also heard banging sounds coming from the couple's apartment shortly before the man fell to death. They suspected that he was trying to remove the bars on the window so that he could make the jump.
“I never thought this would happen,” Miguel Alonso, who identified himself as a neighbor, told the New York Post. “Aged people like that — it’s terrible.”
No suicide note was found at the scene. Only the murder weapon - a knife - was recovered by the police.
The coupe was known to have had a volatile relationship in the neighborhood. They had been married for 40 years and had separated. Although they continued to live together, Walsh finally decided she wanted Albuja-Montalvo out of the house.
“Friday, [their] daughter came with a piece of paper and told him, ‘You must leave — today is your last day,'" Walsh’s close friend Ivelisse Almonte, 52, told the New York Daily News.
Friends with whom Albuja-Montalvo hung out at a McDonald's said he vowed to end his wife’s life over her eviction attempt. He was urged against taking any drastic steps and to move out quietly.
“He said, ‘I’m gonna kill her,’ ” Almonte said. “My friend came to me and told me, ‘You have to tell this lady, your friend, because he’s planning to kill her. He’s been talking about it.'"
Almonte said that her friend deserved much better. “She didn’t deserve to die like that. She was sweet, polite and well-loved. I was very close to her. We were like a family. It hurts. I really urge victims of domestic violence to seek help," she said.