The gruesome stabbing of a pregnant Bronx woman by her live-in boyfriend rekindled her bother’s memories of the wedding day murder of a bride by an ex-boyfriend.
Juan Carlos Abreu, keeping tabs on his sister Wednesday at a Bronx hospital, recalled the September 1999 execution of his wife’s cousin by an obsessive former lover.
“I’m not foreign to this issue,” said Abreu, 42, about cases of love gone brutally wrong. “We were getting ready to go to the wedding when we heard.”
Abreu said his sister, Livia, was in stable condition but still suffering a lot of pain after Oscar Alvarez, father of her child, stabbed her seven times inside their Bronx apartment.
Livia Abreu lost the baby as blood poured from her wounds for 30 minutes while Alvarez held her captive inside their third-floor residence near Yankee Stadium.
Alvarez, 30, remained behind bars Wednesday as Juan Carlos described the attempted murder suspect as a phony.
“He protrays a polite, well-mannered person,” said the brother. “What I can say is he’s not everything he protrays. I never thought he would go to the extreme.
“But I’m not surprised, per se.”
Back in 1999, his in-law Gladys Ricart was shot to death as she prepared to climb inside a white Rolls-Royce limo for a ride to the church. Her ex-boyfriend instead arrived and shot her dead.
Alvarez knifed ex-military paratrooper Livia Abreu in the chest and side during an argument early Tuesday in their home on Walton Ave. near E. 165th St.
Abreu was 26 weeks pregnant with Alvarez’s baby daughter when the attack occurred. She served as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne during her time in the military.
“The defendant prevented the complainant from leaving for approximately 30 minutes while she bled profusely from her wounds,” prosecutor Gregory Desire said during Alvarez’s Bronx Criminal Court appearance.
Desire said Alvarez confessed to detectives after surrendering — and initially insisted that Abreu, 30, was accidentally stabbed seven times.
“I changed my clothes and left in the car,” prosecutors quoted Alvarez as saying.
Officials said he fled the apartment and stole his girlfriend’s 2004 Jeep Cherokee before turning himself in to police about 3 1/2 hours after the 12:30 a.m. stabbing.
Alvarez, clad in a dark navy polo shirt and jeans, was ordered held without bail on attempted murder and other charges.
He said only “Yes ma’am,” when asked by Judge Bahati Pitt if he understood that an order of protection barred him from any contact with Abreu.
The girlfriend was still recovering from her wounds Wednesday at Lincoln Hospital. Abreu, despite her life-threatening injuries, made her way to a neighbor’s second-floor apartment and called for help.
Defense attorney Joshua Hadas, in addition to asking unsuccessfully for bail, argued against allowing media coverage inside the courtroom.
“I don’t believe there is any public interest that will be met … the public is not interested in a spectacle,” he sad in an argument rejected by the judge.
“I’m not going to get into the facts of what happened at this time because the facts are premature,” he said. “He has no criminal history at all. He is a working man. He has spent the last 10 years working at a local store, where he has risen to the level of manager.”
