The deranged Queens dad who allegedly stabbed his wife and 2-year-old daughter to death with a kitchen knife as he FaceTimed his nephew was charged with both slayings, cops said Monday.
Ernesto Cruz, 54, was hit with two counts each of murder and criminal possession of a weapon in connection to the horrific Saturday evening attack on Forest Avenue near Menahan Street in Ridgewood, police said.
Cruz was using the Apple video app to chat with his nephew as he allegedly knifed his 41-year-old wife Ana Pilatagsi-Moposita 18 times and his toddler daughter Analiz Cruz nine times – both in their neck and chest, police told ABC 7.
The panicked nephew called 911 as the murders were carried out on his screen, with officers arriving to find that the father had stabbed himself in the chest afterward.
Both victims were taken to local hospitals, where they succumbed to their injuries, cops said.
Cruz was also hospitalized, and was listed in stable condition Monday, police said. It was not immediately clear whether he would be arraigned virtually from the hospital.
One neighbor who spoke with the heartbroken family claimed Cruz had been mentally abusive to Pilatagsi-Moposita in the past and had threatened several times to take her life.
“He told her many times, ‘One day, I’m going to kill you.’ That means he was planning it,” the neighbor told The Post Sunday.
But police said Monday that the couple did not have a documented domestic violence history with the NYPD.
Cruz’s only brush with the law was on Dec. 23, 2022, when he was slapped with a summons in the city’s transit system, but the circumstances around that incident are unclear, cops said.
The same neighbor told The Post that the woman’s two sons, who lived separately with their father, had been desperately trying to get a hold of their mother on the day of the murders, the neighbor added.
“Oh, my God! You don’t want me to describe how they reacted. You’re calling your mom all day, you come here and hear someone killed her. … It was like a shock and panic attack,” the neighbor said of the sons’ reactions. “Everyone was crying, bawling.”
Other neighbors described Cruz and Pilatagsi-Moposita as a seemingly idyllic couple who could be spotted pushing their tot in her stroller as they went shopping or did the laundry.
“They were a normal family, that’s why it’s so shocking,” one neighbor said. “No one heard anything.”
Read the full article here
