Suspect arraigned in murder of Wall Street cleaning woman

Joseph Pabon, the man the police have suspected from the start in the beastly murder of cleaning woman Eridania Rodriguez in a Wall Street office building last week, has been arrested and arraigned on the basis of his DNA being found under the slain woman’s fingernails. From the relatively normal looking photo of him in the article (in other photos he’s looked like a hulking, swaggering, extremely dangerous savage who had no business working as an elevator operator or being anywhere in normal society), there’s another case of a Caucasian or mostly Caucasian person killing a black person, the last one being the murder of Steve McNair by his girlfriend Sahel Kazemi, who then killed herself. This article, which recounts the evening Rodriguez was slain, has a photo of an attractive, happy-looking Rodriguez, who had recently expressed anxiety to friends and family about working alone in an office building at night. Steve McNair was committing multiple sins and was killed instantly in his sleep by a shot to the right temple. Eridania had simply gone to work, and was ambushed, attacked, tied up, and shoved into an air conditioning duct to suffocate to death with construction tape wrapped around her face.

Here is a fuller account of Rodriguez’s disappearance and the discovery of her body after a four day search, from the July 12 New York Daily News:

Cops found the decomposing body of a missing Manhattan cleaning woman Saturday—her head wrapped like a mummy in heavy-duty yellow and black construction tape, police sources said.

Eridania Rodriguez’s hands and legs had also been bound with tape before she was shoved into an eye-level air-conditioning duct on the 12th floor of 2 Rector St., where she worked, sources said.

Cops made the gruesome find on the fourth day of their desperate search for the mother of three.

They had spent Friday searching for Rodriguez—who was last seen on Tuesday evening at the building—in a Pennsylvania landfill.

Yesterday, an officer on a floor undergoing renovations at the building detected a foul odor and saw missing ceiling tiles.

Dozens of officers and search dogs arrived early yesterday to comb the 26-story building in search of the 46-year-old.

After the grisly discovery, police went to Rodriguez’s Inwood home to notify her family.

“I’m devastated,” her daughter, Yaniris Figueroa, 17, told the Daily News. “I’m still in a state of shock. I really don’t feel well. How could someone have done this to my mom?”

Her brother, Victor Martinez, 35, said this was supposed to have been his sister’s last week on the job because she was scared to work in the building.

“She didn’t want to work there anymore because of the unsafe working conditions,” he said. “She just wanted to leave.”

Martinez, a champion bodybuilder from the Dominican Republic, said an employee at the building recently exposed himself to his sister.

The perv was transferred, but she was still spooked.

“She said she was afraid of being there. She said she was afraid of being alone,” he said.

Rodriguez was caught on surveillance video around 7 p.m. wearing her uniform blue jumpsuit and pushing a cleaning cart into an elevator inside the building, sources said.

She spoke with her daughter by telephone around the same time, but did not show up for dinner with co-workers at 9 p.m. and was never seen leaving the building.

The woman’s clothes and purse were found in her locker and her cleaning cart was abandoned on the eighth floor, causing cops to fear the worst.

Police questioned a building elevator operator—Joseph Pabon—on Thursday, but he was released after he asked for a lawyer.

Pabon, 26, cried when detectives asked him questions about the missing woman, sources said. He had visible scratches on his hands and arms, and couldn’t explain why he left the building early Tuesday night, sources said.

Cops were outside Pabon’s Staten Island home yesterday and pursued him when he drove away.

Pabon has prior arrests, including an April collar for allegedly punching and choking his girlfriend and smashing her windshield with a bowling ball.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 19, 2009 08:22 AM | Send