A loving daughter’s attempt to call her mother on Christmas Eve ended in heartbreak, police said – when her stepfather answered the phone and declared: “I killed her.”
Eva Chalcarz, who lives in California, said she could not believe Slawomir Wielgat’s alleged reply when she called the couple’s New Jersey home and asked to speak to her mother.
“I said ‘You’re kidding.’ He said ‘No, I killed her. She was so stubborn, and it’s over,'” Chalcarz told The Post.
Chalcarz – who was also celebrating her birthday that day – called police, who went to the couple’s Passaic home and found the nude, battered body of Bronislawa Wielgat, 59, cops said.
Her husband of 12 years was arrested and charged with homicide.
“She was beaten about the body,” said Sgt. James Rhoades. “It looks like it was fists.”
Cops who arrested Wielgat found him collapsed “on a sidewalk a couple of houses away. He was found semiconscious” with a bottle of vodka nearby, he said.
“It’s suspected that he was drinking,” the sergeant said.
Chalcarz, who marked her 38th birthday on Christmas Eve, had called to wish her mother a merry Christmas.
She is the eldest of her mother’s four children by her first husband and said her three siblings live in Poland.
Bronislawa, who was born in Poland, came to the United States 21 years ago and met Wielgat here.
“I know he was not good to my mother,” Eva said, describing her mom as a “good person, a hardworking woman” who made “the mistake of her life” when she married Wielgat.
“You have to be a devil,” she said of her stepfather. “No human, especially on Christmas Eve, could kill someone.”
One of the couple’s neighbors, 15-year-old high-school student Leonardo Cirico, said the Wielgats would “fight every day.”
“She’d hide from him,” he said. “When he comes home, she would climb out the window and hide on the porch roof.”
A relative of Slawomir Wielgat, who would not give her name, said the part-time construction worker was born in Warsaw and that he and his wife “fight all the time. It was normal for them.”
“They’ve been drinking for years,” she said. “They’ve been fighting for years. Both had a drinking problem . . . If there was no alcohol, this would never have happened.”