A woman was tied up and burned alive inside a Brooklyn apartment by a boyfriend on Nov. 11, authorities reported. Pedro Velázquez, her ex-partner, found a message on her answering machine before Sugerys Ramírez’s death.
“She said, ‘I just want to tell you that I missed you, I just want to be with you,'” he recounted of the call nine days before her death. “… I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye,” he said.
Ramirez, 40, was attacked by her boyfriend, who is being held for murder and kidnapping after tying her to a chair and burning her alive, officials said.
Lashawn Duffie, 28, was filmed on video buying lighter fluid before heading to the apartment where the woman was being held, prosecutors said.
“That’s something I wish had never happened, but I knew it would happen sooner or later,” said Velazquez, her husband of 10 years. “When I found out what happened, I went crazy.”
Velazquez told the Daily News that he and Ramirez, a mother of two, met at an inpatient rehab center 16 years ago, and their relationship ended in 2021 after the woman started using again. The two remained together intermittently until last summer when she decided to break off the affair.
“The last time I talked to her, I left her a message, and she video-called me back,” he explained. “And she said, ‘You better leave me alone because I have a real man. He treats me like a queen.'”
Prosecutors made it known that the killer became enraged after the victim destroyed her comics and video game console.
For his part, the medical examiner determined Ramirez’s cause of death to be severe burns and homicidal violence, meanwhile, Duffie was jailed at his arraignment with bail imposed at $1 million or $500,000 cash bond.
A close friend of the victim, Eric Warren, claimed Duffie beat and robbed him before leaving the woman’s apartment the night of the homicide.
“He probably wanted me to leave and I wouldn’t leave,” Warren, 59, stated. “That’s how he got me to leave … And I wondered why I was seeing him or dealing with him. He was just a demonic man.”
On the other hand, Velazquez indicated that he tried to visit Ramirez’s body in the morgue for his final farewell, but they said he wouldn’t want to see his burned remains.
“I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye,” he said. “[Duffie] is going to have to live with that because it didn’t just kill her, it killed me. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about her.”