Upper West Side family butchered in murder-suicide remembered at vigil
Friends and neighbors of the Upper West Side family slaughtered in a murder-suicide earlier this week are still stunned and confused by the horrific crime as the four were remembered at a vigil Thursday.
“If you see something, say something. If you see a woman in distress, if you see children in distress … take the mother for a walk,” said Stephanie McGraw, CEO of domestic violence rescue organization We All Really Matter (WARM) during the small vigil it organized outside the West 86th Street building.
“But people don’t know what happens behind closed doors. We weren’t in that house, but what we do know, as we stand here today, that human life was lost and that a mother and her two innocent children are not with us anymore because of an act of violence,” she added.
“Whether it was domestic violence, whether it was mental illness, whether it was stress, it was violence. And they’re not here.”
But residents of the building and the block said they never saw any signs of trouble from the idyllic young family.
Not a single neighbor The Post spoke to Thursday said they saw any indication that building super Edison Lopez, 41, would do the unthinkable — fatally stab his childhood sweetheart Alexandra “Ola” Witek, 40, and their two sons, 3-year-old Lucian and 1-year-old Calvin, before slashing his own throat earlier this week.
“You look at them and you wouldn’t think anything. They went out every day with smiles on their faces,” a nearby doorman said.
Witek and Lopez grew up together on the same block where they died and went to high school with each other.
The couple would often hold hands as they strolled through the neighborhood and always said hi to neighbors and friends, the doorman added.
“It’s a turn of events with the snap of a finger,” he said. “I saw them the day before and it was their normal routine. They said hi — the whole family.”
Witek was a doting mother who frequently took her two boys to Riverside Park, according to a fellow Polish woman and babysitter who met the mom of two there about a year ago.
“She was very friendly, very nice. She always takes care of the kids,” Pisarski, 44, told The Post as she paid her respects at a makeshift memorial outside the family’s apartment building. “She always ran after them. Very protecting.”
Lopez with always with little Lucian and Calvin wherever they went, too, a block resident said.
“He was always smiling. He was always with his kids. They were always together,” Danielle said. “I never see him sad.”
The dad grew up in the same apartment where he committed the crime so gruesome that investigators mistakenly identified one of his boys as a girl at first.
Lopez followed in his father’s footsteps, taking over as super when the elder Lopez moved out of the building now lined with flowers, toy cars and teddy bears.
He was well known and beloved by not just residents of the building but seemingly everybody on the block.
“That’s why everyone is so shocked. He lived here his entire life,” the doorman said.
Another neighbor who knew Lopez for decades said he couldn’t believe that the super, who he called a “sweet fixture of our neighborhood,” killed his longtime love and their babies.
“This is just unfathomable to me, that an act of violence can come from this lovely, gentlemanly sweet person,” Philip Caggiano, 74, told The Post.
“Edison was a lovely, lovely young man. I knew him since he was a teenager. I spoke with him every week for decades,” he added. “Just a lovely kind polite gentleman.”
Caggiano said he watched him grow up and start a family.
“I remember seeing him with a stroller [for the first time] and I said, ‘Oh you’re a father, how exciting’.”
Even Lopez’s own father cannot make sense of his son’s decision to knife the throats of his kids and their mother before slicing his own.
“If you look around and ask their friends — very level-headed individuals. Both of them,” Mario Lopez, 66, told Gothamist, referring to his son and Witek. “You usually see problems in a couple where you see the behavior of the children affected immediately. Their grandmother, my wife, took care of them. We didn’t see anything.”
The elder Lopez, who works as a superintendent across the street from his son’s building on West 86th Street, said he and his wife were the ones who discovered the bodies inside the family’s apartment Monday, after being unable to reach them since Sunday.
He drilled the lock on the front door and caught sight of blood inside, sources said.
“We saw them inside,” Mario Lopez told Gothamist, as he held back tears. “They were already dead, whatever happened, happened maybe the day before.”
First responders encountered the badly bloodied bodies of the two boys in the living room with two knives nearby before they found Witek’s body in the hall with a deep cut to her neck, police sources said.
Lopez was discovered lying lifeless on a bed with another knife next to him, according to the sources.
All four family members died of “sharp force injuries” and “incise wounds” to their necks, the city medical examiner determined.
The family was planning to move out of the city into a bigger home just days for the grisly slayings.
Caggiano may be one of the last people to see the family alive as he crossed paths with them on Sunday.
“I said how nice you’re out for a stroll on this beautiful day. He acknowledged that. And I said I hope you’re taking pictures of your kids to send to your dad,” the neighbor told The Post. “He said ‘I am but he’s in town this week.’”
He said he is heartbroken over their violent deaths.
“I don’t know anyone who could have possibly told you this wasn’t a warm, polite, gentlemanly, lovely young man,” Caggiano said.
“God only knows what could have happened to cause this terrible occurrence.”
If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts or are experiencing a mental health crisis and live in New York City, you can call 1-888-NYC-WELL for free and confidential crisis counseling. If you live outside the five boroughs, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.
