The 92-year-old SoHo woman smothered by her roommate for snoring too loud was deteriorating for years, neighbors say, but city and state agencies ignored calls for help.
Neighbors say that they saw Veronica Ivins, a once fashionable outgoing woman, languishing away before their eyes.
“She was always a vibrant woman, who loved to travel,” neighbor Meghan Loveland, 28, said. “She went from wearing fur coats and silk scarves to wearing ragged T-shirts. She went from a healthy, active woman to being taken out on a stretcher.”
Enrique Leyva, 47, confessed to investigators that he was growing jealous of a third roommate who shared the fifth-floor walk-up on Sullivan Street, prosecutors said.
Leyva was also bothered by Ivins loud snoring. He said he had thought of killing her “10 times” before, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos said.
“He grabbed her pillow and held that pillow over her face for approximately ten minutes,” the prosecutor said at Leyva’s arraignment on a murder charge in Manhattan Criminal Court Friday. Leyva checked her pulse and then put the pillow back over her face, finishing her off by strangling her, Bogdanos said.
Leyva called 911 to report it afterward.
People who live in the building said that call brought the same city services that could have prevented the tragedy.
“This didn’t need to happen,” said Brooklyn Lastra, 34, a social worker who lives directly upstairs in one of three rent controlled apartments in the building. “We called Adult Protective Services a number of times. We called the landlord.”
Nobody responded.
“We called and called and nobody did anything,” Lastra said.
Loveland and Lastra said that they thought the two men who lived with Ivins were taking advantage of her and trying to take over her apartment.
“When things got bad (with her roommates), we called the cops at least four times,” Lastra said. “She lived in squalor with no working gas for two years. The ceiling collapsed in the bathroom from a leak, the landlord wouldn’t fix. She couldn’t even use the bathtub.”
The frustrated neighbors said they called every city and state agency they could think of.
“I never heard anything back till a few minutes ago,” Loveland, a surgical tech, said after the news broke. “Now they’re all calling to cover themselves.”
The city declined to comment citing legal restrictions.
“Due to Social Service Law, we cannot discuss the specifics of this matter,” Lourdes Centeno, Human Resources Administration spokeswoman, said.
Leyva was held without bail at his arraignment. His lawyer requested a psychiatric testing.
With Jillian Jorgensen
