A 45-year-old woman was found shot to death and decomposing in her Bronx apartment, cops said Sunday.
Police came knocking on Cindy Maxwell’s door in the Parkside Houses on Arnow Ave. near Barker Ave. in Allerton about 3:50 p.m. Saturday after receiving a call asking them to check on her well-being.
That call came from a downstairs neighbor who said he was alarmed by the foul smell.
“It smelled like 200 dead rats upstairs,” said the neighbor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Just coming off the elevator there was a really bad smell. I had to locate that smell and I called it in.”
NYPD officers found Maxwell dead face-up inside her apartment. She had been shot multiple times in the chest, cops said.
“She was lying there in the living room with gunshot wounds to her body,” the downstairs neighbor said. “She was decomposing. Her body was swollen up.”
Neighbor said they heard four gunshots on Wednesday but police responded to a different building in the complex, perhaps because of the way the sound echoes through the housing development.
“I know what a dead body smells like and I was just trusting my gut feeling. I called cops for a wellness check on that apartment,” he said. “Nobody ever came since the shooting. I was like, ‘I’m sick of this and it’s been smelling like this for two days.’”
Maxwell worked as a home attendant, said one friend, Marta Medina.
“She was a nice person,” said Medina, 50. “She lived in the building a long time and she had two daughters. One I think was 11 and the other around 6.”
It’s not clear who has custody of the children now or where they were staying in the days leading up to the discovery of their mother’s body.
“It really shocked me,” Medina said. “She did me a favor last week. She gave me a can of spaghetti sauce … I don’t know of anyone who would do this to her.”
Police have made no arrests in her slaying.
The killing marks the fourth homicide in the Bronx’s 49th Precinct this year The precinct saw nine killings in all of 2022, according to NYPD statistics.
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