A woman who was killed and left in an Upper Manhattan park was losing her battle with addiction and was estranged from her family despite her best efforts to get clean, friends of the victim said.
A passerby discovered Doris Perez’s lifeless body along a hiking trail inside Highbridge Park near Amsterdam Ave. and W. 174th St. on Sept. 16 around 9:20 a.m., police said.
The city’s medical examiner later determined that a puncture wound found in the 41-year-old woman’s back and compression of her neck caused her death, which was ruled a homicide.
Her killer remained at large Saturday. Friends and police say Perez had been homeless the last few years.
“I don’t know who would be so malicious to want to take her away from her family,” Pricilla Mendoza, 50, a childhood friend, told the Daily News. “It wasn’t an overdose. Somebody killed her. What did she do to them for them to be so malicious towards her?”
Mendoza said her friend, a mother of two daughters, struggled with addiction as an adult despite several attempts to get clean.
“Growing up she was the sweetest girl,” said Mendoza, who grew up with Perez in a housing complex in upstate Middletown. “Even with all the hard things she had to go through growing up, she was a good girl. She wasn’t a bad person.”
Mariela Lombard for New York Daily News
Highbridge Park. (Mariela Lombard for New York Daily News)
Cops said Perez was found lying face up in the park, which runs nearly three miles from Washington Heights to Inwood and abuts the Harlem River Drive. Her death remains a mystery as detectives try to determine why she was killed.
Meanwhile, Perez death has left her family and those close to her bereft. Another friend, Marie Rivera, 39, said Perez had fallen out with her family and had even stayed with her for a brief time.
“The mom was so hurt to see her in that way,” Rivera said of her friend’s struggle with addiction. “Her mom loved her very much. Her mom used to suffer so much and worry about her. It’s like she was against the wall. In a way, I understood her mom. It’s not that her mother didn’t love her. They were starting to talk, but it was slowly.”
“Her mom didn’t know what to do for her, how to get her help,” she said.
Rivera said it was tough on both sides.
“She always said to me, ‘I love my mom. No matter what, I love my mom,’” Rivera recalled. “She used to say, ‘I know I did things that’s not right. My mom is doing what she needs to do and I love her. I messed up and I want to get sober and I just don’t know how to.’”
Perez’s family declined to comment on her death.
Despite her troubles, Perez was a good person, her friends said.
Mendoza said she last spoke to Perez at the beginning of the year, but said she did not know her friend was homeless.
“I was definitely surprised to hear that this happened to her,” she said of her friend’s death. “Even more surprised to hear that she was homeless because she’s never been homeless. She’s always had somewhere to go. Always had a roof over her head. Whether it was with family, going to a hotel, she always had somewhere to go.”
Toward the end, though, it got pretty bad, Rivera said.
“She was hopping from place to place, from home to home,” Rivera said. “At first she was not homeless. This was a couple years ago. She was in addiction and then she got homeless and I tried to help her and that’s when she came to my house the first time. I tried to help her.”
A short time later, she said, Perez left and ended up in rehab.
“She got better,” Rivera said. “The second time around, she relapsed pretty bad. We stayed connected but because she was homeless, it was pretty hard.”
“She wanted to get the help, but she didn’t know how,” she said.