Bronx Woman and 10-year-old Girl Dead, Suspect in Hospital with Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound

Police tape in a stock photo. Carl Ballou/Shutterstock

A New York man allegedly suffocated a 10-year-old girl and her mother to death before shooting himself in the head in what authorities have described as an attempted suicide.

The man, identified in a New York Post report as 32-year-old Ezort Stevens, was hospitalized at St. Barnabas in the Bronx, where he remains in critical condition following the June 15 incident.

New York police were called to a Bronx apartment at around 2 p.m. on Saturday after the victim’s 13-year-old son came home and found his sister dead, according to the New York Daily News. The boy contacted his relatives, who called 911.

When police arrived on the scene, they found the man in the couple’s bed with his eyes open and a gun in his hand, the Daily News reported. He had sustained a self-inflicted bullet wound to his head, police said.

Authorities have identified the victims as 34-year-old Linda Manigault and 10-year-old Heaven Ross, who is believed to be the woman’s daughter.

Police said there were no outward signs of trauma on the victims and that an autopsy would be carried out to determine the cause of death.

Neighbors cited in the report said Manigault was in a relationship with the suspect, though the Daily Mail reported there were conflicting accounts as to whether Ross was the man’s daughter.

Neighbors told the Daily News they never suspected anything was wrong.

“People out here had no words... we didn’t know what to think,” said a 13-year-old neighbor who was friends with the slain girl.

“When they brought out the first body we were still in shock.”

Police cited by The Post said two of the woman’s other daughters, aged 15 and 17, were waiting outside the home when they arrived.

“She was crying hysterically, saying, “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!’ and screaming loud,” the 13-year-old neighbor told The Post regarding one of the victim’s daughters. “The little girl asked for water. We brought her water, tried to calm them down.”

Man Who Murdered Elderly Woman With Fire Extinguisher Jailed

In other crime news, an illegal immigrant who bludgeoned an 83-year-old woman to death with a fire extinguisher has been sentenced to 22 years behind bars.

Esdras Marroquin Gomez of Guatemala pleaded guilty in May to the 2015 murder of Lois Colley, the wife of a millionaire McDonald’s franchise owner, Fox News reports.

Marroquin Gomez, now 34, had worked on the Colleys’ 300-acre estate in North Salem, New York, about five times but was not employed there at the time of the murder, Fox News reported.

On the day of the murder, Marroquin Gomez went to the Colleys’ home to ask for compensation for a chainsaw injury he sustained on the property that he said made it difficult for him to find work. He asked to see Eugene Colley, the victim’s husband, but he was not there. The 83-year-old woman then offered him cab fare to go to her husband’s office in Croton Falls, according to court testimony.

Marroquin Gomez then bludgeoned the elderly woman to death with a fire extinguisher. She was found in a pool of blood in the home’s laundry room.

Assistant District Attorney Julia Cornachio said the attack was exceedingly violent.

“This defendant bashed her face in. The callousness and evil that that required...is incomprehensible,” Cornachio said, according to the Westchester Journal News.

Marroquin Gomez flew to Guatemala on Nov. 14, 2015—four days after the murder. He was eventually found in Mexico and taken to Westchester County, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

At the June 14 sentencing, Marroquin Gomez read a letter aloud asking for forgiveness from God “for having taken the life of a human being and doing horrible damage to the Colley family,” the Westchester Journal News reports.

In a letter read out in court, Eugene asked that Marroquin Gomez receive the maximum possible punishment for his wife’s brutal murder.

“I rushed home and saw her lying there in a pool of blood. I immediately started CPR from my Naval training. In the meantime yelling to try and get help. The blood puddle kept enlarging and I realized that the love of my life wasn’t going to come back. I realised to leave her side and kept hoping and praying that by some miracle she would come back to us.”

One of the Colley’s sons, Bryan Colley, called his mother’s murder a “vicious and brutal” killing that was the “definition of evil,” Westchester Journal News reported.

His daughter, Christine Colley, told the judge about her grandmother as well as how the murder had impacted her. “I’m sad, I’m angry, and I’m terrified,” she said.

Westchester County Court Judge George Fufidio handed down a sentence that was at the upper range of the punishment the prosecution had called for, noting that Gomez had “brutally and savagely” beaten Colley to death.

Marroquin Gomez will spend 22 years in prison.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.