April 29, 2009 Staff Report
A 24-year-old Sunnyside female was stabbed and killed in her 43rd Street apartment Monday, according to police.
The victim, Michelle Lee, was found tied to her bed Monday morning with a knife stuck in her neck, police said. Her body was discovered by her roommate just after 8 a.m., police said.
It was unclear when she was killed, and her roommate, who had returned the night before, made the grisly discovery after sleeping all night in the next room.
Lee, a civilian NYPD employee, appeared to have been dead for a few days, police sources said.
She was tied to the bed and had been stabbed repeatedly, burned on her belly with an iron and strangled with the cord of a cell phone charger, sources said.
The roommate, who also is a NYPD civilian worker, told investigators that she was out of town for the weekend and returned to the third-floor 43rd St. apartment Sunday night.
Believing Lee was sleeping, the roommate didn’t think anything was amiss when she didn’t see her that night, she told investigators. But when she checked on Lee Monday morning, she encountered the bloody scene.
“She came down the stairs screaming. She said, ‘She’s dead in the bed,'” said Milenko Mijat, 68, the landlord. “It was terrible.”
Lee, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice graduate, joined the NYPD in September and specialized in narcotics testing at a police lab.
Investigators are looking to interview a few of Lee’s ex-boyfriends, including one former flame who is stricken with terminal cancer, the sources said.
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