Police are searching for two squatters who somehow got into a vacant upscale Manhattan apartment, killed the woman who owned it, and fled the state in her stolen Lexus.
New York Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Thursday that the two suspects, a man and a woman, crashed the vehicle in Pennsylvania and then were spotted at several local car dealerships there trying to buy another car for $1,000, the New York Post reported.
Kenny didn’t name the suspects but said one of them has a prior arrest. Surveillance video showed them leaving the exclusive apartment after the murder.
“As of right now, we have probable cause, we have two subjects, we have the Regional Fugitive Task Force actively hunting as we speak,” Kenny said.
Nadia Vitels’s son found her body, stuffed into a duffle bag in a closet. She had blunt force trauma to the head, multiple facial fractures, a brain bleed, and two broken ribs, according to police.
Kenny explained that the Kips Bay apartment had been empty for three or four months after the death of Vitels’s mother. She went there last week to prepare it for a family friend to move in, and likely encountered the squatters at that time, WNBC reported.
“We believe that some squatters took the apartment over, and this woman came home to get this apartment set up and walked in on the squatters that were there,” Kenny said.
Kenny didn’t say why investigators believe that the suspects were squatters or provide an explanation for how they got into the luxury, 19th floor apartment.
“The apartment itself is very unique in that there’s no front door to apartment. You take an elevator up and then you key your way in. The elevator is actually your front door,” Kenny said.
According to WCBS, surveillance footage showed Vitels, 52, coming and going from the apartment after her arrival. Police believe the squatters returned and beat her to death, fleeing in her vehicle.
The suspects crashed Vitels’s Lexus SUV in Lower Paxton Township just outside Harrisburg. Pennsylvania police didn’t run the tags on the vehicle until the day after they found the crash and didn’t see the alert on the vehicle until then.
If they had, Kenny said, “they would have seen that we had a felony alarm on the car for being stolen and wanted in connection with a homicide.”
Kenny said both suspects are believed to be in their 20s.
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[Featured image: Nadia Vitels/Facebook]
