A 38-year-old mother from Queens was found dead in a Soho hotel room last Thursday with a bloody iron by her side.
Police said the body of Denisse Oleas-Arancibia was found on the floor of the lower Manhattan hotel room covered by a blanket, according to the New York Post.
Police said she was murdered and suffered strangulation, as well as blunt head trauma.
No arrests have been made, police said Monday.
Edwin Cevallos, 18, who is the victim’s son, said he spoke to his mother the day before she was killed.
“In the week (before) she was like, sad. She was so nervous, and she was worried,” Cevallos said, according to the Daily News.
“My mom, she worked very hard,” Cevallos said. “She was working all day. She was always working for us to give us the best life in this country.”
“The best part of her is she always helped us and the family, and she was very organized. She always had money to cover anything in the house. She didn’t owe no money to anybody,” he said.
Cevallos said he did not know what his mother did for a living.
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“All I knew is that every day at 2 p.m. she went to Manhattan to work,” he said.
Oleas-Arancibia’s 13-year-old son and her parents still live in Ecuador.
“She wanted a better life because in Ecuador is a lot of bad people. It was so dangerous,” he said. “She gave us the life that we always wanted.”
The day before her death, Oleas-Arancibia woke her son up for school, made him breakfast and paid for a taxi to get him to school.
Cevallos said she blessed him with the sign of the cross, “then she said, ‘Goodbye, I love you.’”
Who Killed Denisse Oleas-Arancibia? The Mystery of the SoHo Hotel Murder https://t.co/UKFtGN0y0a
— NewsUnzip (@NewsUnzip) February 13, 2024
According to the New York Post, police are pursuing the possible theory that the victim was a sex worker and have discovered she stayed at the hotel where she was found dead for several nights each month for the past year.
The U.K’s Daily Mail reported that police have been told the woman was seen in an area frequented by prostitutes.
The report said that police have identified a man as a suspect in her death.
