Though original reports listed no items missing from the second floor apartment where Pimentel lived alone, her cousin said that Pimentel’s cell phone had been stolen. This, she added, is a cause of great concern to her family as they mourn.
“She had a lot of friends who contacted the family (after the murder). I don’t know who’s calling now,” the cousin said from Pennsylvania. At the recommendation of NYPD officers, she withheld her name.
Similar apprehension remains on 87th Avenue. “We’re all buggin’ out,” said friend and neighbor Angel Rodriguez. He added that anyone who lived near the scene of such a savage attack would feel similarly.
He said that police officers occasionally return to the crime scene, particularly when a neighbor reports a light being switched on in the house’s hallway, but that the investigation’s pace seems to have slowed. Reward posters offering $2,000 to anyone with information leading to an arrest remain duct taped to Pimentel’s old front door and to the block’s utility poles. Each morning different friends and neighbors light several of the 50 plus candles placed in front of Pimentel’s old apartment. The first floor tenants packed and left shortly after the discovery of Pimentel’s body.
Rodriguez said that two 87th Avenue homeowners have mounted surveillance cameras above their doors after the murder. He added that since there were no signs of forced entry — leading many to believe that Pimentel knew her killer — concern is heightened. That someone also killed Pimentel’s cherished dog that she dressed with a gay pride collar further signaled to Rodriguez that the attack was personal.
She hosted parties regularly and a few unfamiliar faces had come and gone from Pimentel’s apartment in the weeks before her body was found, Rodriguez said.
He added that none looked suspicious, but other neighbors, including 87th Avenue’s Rubin Perez, said that they now take extra precautions. He warned his sister, who he lives with, about the dangers she could encounter when walking to or from the Jamaica Avenue subway station where she often catches the J or Z train at night.
Though Perez never met Pimentel, family members and friends painted a portrait of a girl simultaneously open and fun loving and guarded and suspicious. Rodriguez said that she would “cuckoo” when walking around the corner to let those gathered on the sidewalk know that she was coming and that she would often playfully wrestle with friends, male and female. She had recently broken up with a longtime girlfriend and was regularly out on the town, some friends said.
But others noted that she would leave her television on whenever she left her apartment to ward off would be intruders and that she left her Bethlehem home town fearing that her family would be hurt by the truth about her sexuality.
Back in Pennsylvania, Pimentel’s cousin said that the slain victim’s parents remain inconsolable. She added that Pimentel’s mother, Nancy Laracuente, couldn’t bring herself to put up a Christmas tree this year.
“There’s no justice at all,” Pimentel’s cousin said.
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