A Bronx gunman killed his girlfriend and then himself while she made a desperate phone call to her father for help, the dad told the Daily News.
The father was able to call 911 at 9:04 p.m. Tuesday with his 37-year-old daughter Andrea Cantarini still on the other line.
“I was on the phone with her for 14 minutes while he was holding a gun to her head,” her father, Rudy Cantarini told the Daily News. “I was begging for her life. And he ended up taking her life.”
“She wanted to break up with him and he couldn’t handle it,” he added. “He’s a coward.”
Her 38-year-old boyfriend shot Cantarini in the head and then did the same thing to himself inside their apartment on Blackstone Ave. near W. 239th St. in Riverdale.
Police said Cantarini called her father and told him her boyfriend was trying to killer her, at which point he called 911 on another line and told the dispatcher what was happening.
“Of course he heard me,” the father said of his daughter’s killer. “She put it on speaker. I was just begging him to let her go. He just wouldn’t do it. And then I heard a gunshot. And then I heard the phone fall and that’s it in a nutshell.”
The victim was a nurse at St. Barnabas Hospital and she and her killer, who she had been with for a decade, were parents of a 6-year-old girl. The boyfriend worked at airports as a federal customs officer, according to the victim’s father.
When police got to the scene the daughter and her boyfriend were dead at the scene. The boyfriend’s name was not immediately released.
Cantarini was trying to leave her boyfriend when she was killed.
“She had brought her (daughter) here yesterday morning,” Rudy Cantarini said. “(Her boyfriend) was acting a little irrational. And then after that, she went to go get clothes. She thought he was working. She went to go get clothes and he was waiting for her in ambush. Se called me up and I saw my poor daughter was murdered. It’s very hard.”
“She was the apple of our eye and now she’s gone,” he added. “She was beautiful person inside and out and she was loved by everybody that knew her.”
The couple had no history of domestic incidents involving police, NYPD officials said.