A 40-year-old woman was found dead inside her Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, apartment after a neighbor says he heard roughly half an hour of hammering followed by a shouted obscenity, and police have made no arrests.
Erika Miranda-Tlacua's body was discovered shortly before 4 a.m. on August 1 in a two-story building on 64th Street near 16th Avenue, the New York Post reported. Emergency medical crews pronounced her dead at the scene. The cause of death: blunt force trauma.
As of Thursday, the NYPD had released no suspect description and confirmed no one had been taken into custody. That silence left Miranda-Tlacua's family scrambling for answers, and neighbors rattled by what they heard and saw in the hours before dawn.
A resident who identified himself only by his initials, A.L., told the Post he first noticed music and singing coming from the apartment around 12:15 a.m.
"There was music and people singing around 12:15 a.m. and it stops around 2 a.m. And then the hammer starts."
A.L. said he recorded the noise. He described a single loud blow at the start, then a sustained stretch of hammering lasting about 30 minutes. When it stopped, he heard two words.
"I recorded it. It was 30 minutes of hammering and it started with a strong one. When the hammer finish, I heard 'F, k you!'"
Then silence. Less than two hours later, police found Miranda-Tlacua's body.
NYPD detectives were seen going in and out of the building carrying evidence bags throughout the morning of August 1. Beyond confirming the body's discovery time and the cause of death, police offered little publicly.
No motive has been disclosed. No suspect has been named or described. The investigation remains open.
A female neighbor who lived next door and asked to remain anonymous told the Post the discovery shook her.
"This news has left me a bit shaken, [just imagine, a dead person]. I think they said they found the apartment empty, with only the deceased woman there. Just imagine, leaving someone like that all alone in the apartment."
Ronald, a UPS driver who had been near the building earlier, said he first noticed a police car while driving his route. He did not learn what had happened until he checked Instagram.
"I didn't know what exactly was going on, but when I went to my IG that's when I found the post and I was like, 'What! I was there earlier. What's going on?' Then I saw that there was a woman found dead in her apartment."
He described himself as shocked.
Miranda-Tlacua's cousin, Gris Aguirre, who lives in Red Bank, New Jersey, set up a Spanish-language GoFundMe campaign to raise money to fly the body back to San Juan Tejaluca, a small village in the central Mexican state of Puebla. As of the Post's report, the campaign had raised $305.
The GoFundMe page described the family's grief plainly:
"With broken hearts, we ask for your support today during one of the most difficult times of our lives. Our beloved cousin was the victim of an act of violence that has left us devastated. Her passing was sudden and painful, and now we face the daunting task of raising the necessary funds to cover the expenses and bring her body home so we can give her the dignified farewell she deserves."
Aguirre told the Post by text that she planned to travel to Brooklyn on Monday because no arrest had been made. The family, it appears, was not content to wait.
One male neighbor, who also asked not to be named, offered a broader observation about the area.
"It used to be that you knew your neighbors back in the day but now it's a lot of turnover."
That turnover matters. In a building where residents once kept track of one another, a woman died violently, and no one intervened during what a neighbor described as a full half-hour of hammering. No one called police until the damage was done.
The NYPD's silence, no suspect, no description, no arrest, leaves every resident on that block to wonder who was in that apartment and whether they are still nearby. A family in Puebla is raising a few hundred dollars to bury a woman who came to New York and met a violent end behind a closed door. The least the city owes them is an answer.
