A 7-year-old girl spent the night sleeping peacefully next to her mother in their Washington Heights home — not realizing her mom was dead after a savage beating from a man the mother was dating, heartbroken relatives say.
The little girl answered the door when cops came knocking at their apartment on W. 156th St. near Amsterdam Ave. the next afternoon, about 1:35 p.m. Saturday.
Inside, cops found the girl’s mother, 27-year-old Lovay Williams, dead with trauma to her head and neck, NYPD officials say.
Her suspected killer left the home about an hour before the gruesome discover and has not been caught.
“She witnessed the whole murder,” Williams’ father NuQuan Williams said of the victim’s young daughter. “My granddaughter told the detectives everything, play by play … She has to suffer and she experienced a lot of trauma.”
“He tried to clean (Lovay) up” after killing her, NuQuan said, based on what his granddaughter told cops.
“He tried to put (Lovay) in the bathtub. After he put her in the bathtub, he tried to clean the house down. Put her back into the bed. Put the covers over her trying to think about his getaway plan.”
Lovay’s daughter was too young to understand what was going on, her family says.
“My granddaughter just laid next to my daughter as my daughter was ‘asleep,’” NuQuan said. “Because she don’t know her mother is dead.”
The NYPD has not named a suspect but say they are looking for a man she was romantically involved with. Lovay had been casually dating the man her family believes killed her for about two years.
“He’s the devil,” the victim’s father said. “Anytime you put your hands on a woman, you’re a piece of garbage … For him to do that in front of my granddaughter, I’m just at a loss of words.”
The victim’s family, including her young daughter, attended a balloon release vigil Monday night at the Courtney Callender playground in Harlem.
“No parent deserves to bury their child, especially in a manner like that,” the victim’s mother Monica Manners said as she cried. “She should be here to take care of her own child.
A neighbor, Jim Aiken, 73, said he saw a man coming and going from Lovay’s apartment Saturday. The man left for the final time at 12:24 p.m., getting into a car carrying a bunch of trash bags full of stuff, Aiken said.
Cops arrived just over an hour later after a female relative called 911 asking for a wellness check, according to the NYPD.
“She was always, always, a good mother to my granddaughter,” Nuquan said of Lovay, who was studying for her GED, taking college classes and working as a home health aide. “Police came to the house and when they knocked my granddaughter opened the door for them.”
The Administration for Children’s Services briefly took custody of the girl before turning her over to her grandmother, who will now raise her.
“She’s still thinking that her mother’s asleep,” NuQuan said of his granddaughter. “Because normally, her mother go to sleep, she’ll lay next to her mother. That’s their thing. They was always together. It hasn’t hit her yet but soon she’ll be looking for her mother.”
NuQuan started to learn of the tragedy when he got a call from his son.
“He was telling me that ACS said to come to the hospital, that something happened with Lovay,” Nuquan said.
“When the police department came to the residence her mom was dead so they took (Lovay’s daughter) to the hospital to check her out, make sure she’s OK. They must have looked for the next of kin and that’s when they called us and told us to come to the hospital. We was looking for Lovay and they kept giving us the runaround … I kept asking, ‘Where’s Lovay?’”
When he couldn’t get answer at the hospital, NuQuan went to his daughter’s home.
“I said, ‘You know what? Let me go back to Lovay’s house,’” he said. “And Lovay was still in the apartment, dead. So we waited for the Medical Examiner to come and we watched them take her body out.”
Lovay talked to her mother on the phone all day every day, relatives said, and loved to take care of her whole extended family.
“She loved cooking. She could cook you out the kitchen,” said Lovay’s aunt Precious Manners added. “I had just spoke to her and we was supposed to get together and she was going to cook for me. I was regularly checking up on her.”
“Then something like this happens and it feels like she was robbed from us,” she added. “She lived for her daughter so it was heartbreaking that this happened in front of her.”
With Rocco Parascandola