The grandmother of the slain woman whose decomposing corpse was thrown in the trash outside a Manhattan apartment building warned the victim something was not right with the man the granddaughter was living with — who is now suspected in the murder.
“I could feel it. I kept saying, ‘She needs to get out of that house,’” Essie Graham said of her slain granddaughter Yazmeen Williams. “I wanted someone to go over there and make a lot of noise. But nobody really took it seriously.”
Williams’ mother was also concerned about her daughter’s living situation but didn’t know how to get Williams out, Graham said.
“My daughter said ‘Ma, I agree with you but how you gonna do that?’” Graham said.
To her family’s relief, about a week before her body was found, Williams saw her grandmother and told her she was moving back in with her.
“She told me, ‘Mama, I’m coming home’ and everything seemed fine,” Graham recalled. “If I knew (what was to come), I would have made her come home.”
Cops charged Chad Irish with concealment of a human corpse after he was identified as the man in a motorized wheelchair allegedly caught on video leaving the body next to trash bags outside an apartment building on E. 27th St. near Third Ave. in Kips Bay just before 5 p.m. Friday.
The 55-year-old ex-con was attacked by a mob as he was taken out of his apartment building on E. 28th St. near Second Ave. by cops Monday. Williams’ mother and two aunts were present at the dramatic scene.
In November, Williams moved out of her grandmother’s Kips Bay home and into Irish’s apartment in the Straus Houses two-and-a-half blocks away. Williams referred to Irish as her “homeboy,” her distraught grandmother said.
In the months leading up to Williams’ death, Graham began to worry about her granddaughter, and wondered if she was quietly in a relationship with the much-older Irish.
“She always said that he was her friend,” Graham said in an exclusive interview with the Daily News. “I think because she knew I wouldn’t approve.”
Graham, unable to shake the feeling something was wrong, had begun sending her grandson, Williams’ twin brother, over to check on Williams a couple of times a week.
“Now that I look back I think God was letting me know she needed to get out of that house,” said Graham. “If I ever get that feeling again about my grandkids or anyone else, I’ll listen.”
Williams’ body was so badly decomposed police were not initially sure of the victim’s gender. Days later, the death was deemed a homicide and the victim was identified as Williams. Her body was found after neighbors complained of the smell.
Williams’ cause of death was deemed to be a gunshot to the head, which the Medical Examiner told her family came “at close range.” Nobody has yet been charged with killing her.
A high-ranking police source said Tuesday one possible theory for the motive involved drugs that either Williams or Irish possessed, and that he is believed to be responsible for her death.
“God ain’t call her home,” said Graham. “That guy did. He is the devil.”
“I think she told him she was leaving so he thought, ‘If I can’t have you nobody can,’” Graham added. “But she don’t want him.”
Williams lived between her mother and grandmother’s apartments as a child. After graduating from Buffalo State College with a degree in criminal justice in 2016 she moved in fulltime with Graham.
During a Tuesday press briefing, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said police believe Williams had recently picked up a drug habit and stayed with Irish, who has a history of drugs, on and off out of “convenience.”
Video obtained by The News shows cops and medics carrying Irish out of the Kips Bay building Monday on a stretcher and into police custody as a mob of people swarmed them.
The first responders battled to get through the crowd attacking Irish.
“When you die I want you to burn in hell,” Graham said of Irish. “My heart is broken and it’s never gonna be healed.”
Before her death, Williams was looking forward to starting a new job, according to Graham.
At a press briefing Tuesday, Mayor Adams said Williams was due to start a job with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development this week and become a “public servant.”
“I’m proud of her,” Graham said of her granddaughter. “She was a beautiful girl. She had a good heart.”
“She had a long life ahead of her,” the devastated woman added.
With Michael Gartland and Thomas Tracy
