Family of a Bronx mom strangled by a rubber workout band in 2021 are speaking out for the first time after her boyfriend was sentenced to 25 years this week for the vicious killing.
“She was an angel, I swear, an angel,” victim Belkis Lopez’s father Arismendy Lopez told the Daily News on Thursday. “I tell you the truth, three years she die already and I still cry with her.”
Belkis Lopez, 35, was found by her then-14-year-old daughter in their apartment on E. 158th St. near Melrose on the morning of Sept. 20 when she woke up to get ready for school, according to police. Cops quickly began focusing on her on-again, off-again boyfriend Angel DeJesus, 46.
Arismendy Lopez, 69, said his daughter had stopped wanting to live with the man who ended up killing her.
Neighbors previously said DeJesus had banged on their doors three days before the killing and made bizarre accusations about the victim.
“He knocked on my door to ask to use my phone. He was crying,” said Rachel McKelvie, 55. “He made her out to be the aggressor. He said she was accusing him of raping both of their daughters. He said, ‘She don’t like Black people or Spanish people.’
“He used to say, ‘She used voodoo. She killed people,’” added McKelvie. “He’s a psycho.”
In April 2017, police filed a domestic incident report for harassment after Lopez told officers her boyfriend had threatened her.
“If I can’t have you, no one will,” he allegedly said.
Lopez’s still-grieving father can’t comprehend why men murder their wives and girlfriends.
“I don’t understand, they killing people like this,” he said.
DeJesus went on the run for three months after killing Lopez and was captured in December 2021 in Brooklyn, said police. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Feb. 7, according to the Bronx district attorney’s office.
Arismendy Lopez said his three grandchildren now live with their maternal grandmother, and the victim’s now 16-year-old daughter sometimes stays with her father. Relatives of DeJesus, who fathered the victim’s two younger daughters, have been trying to spend time with them — but Arismendy Lopez is not having it.
“He wants his sister to see the daughters. I don’t believe what he’s looking for,” the Arismendy Lopez said of DeJesus. “If you’re killing the mother of the daughter, the daughter’s not going to see you with a nice face.”
“The victim’s children were in the home when their mother was strangled to death by the defendant. They will have to face the trauma of this unimaginable horror for the rest of their lives,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said Thursday.
DeJesus’ prison sentence, handed down Wednesday, gave small comfort to Arismendy Lopez.
“Let me tell you, [even though] they give him 25 years, my daughter’s not going to come back again,” the victim’s father said.
With Thomas Tracy
