NEW YORK _ A deported immigrant who illegally returned to the U.S. is now charged with killing his Bronx girlfriend and leaving her body to rot for a month.
Luis Severino, 49, was indicted Tuesday on charges he allegedly stabbed his girlfriend, Cindy Olivo, 33, in their Fordham Heights apartment sometime in June.
Police found her decomposed body July 12 in the apartment after neighbors complained of a foul odor. At first, authorities thought she'd died of a drug overdose.
An autopsy proved otherwise, revealing two stab wounds on each side of her neck, cops said.
Olivo's family suspected Severino killed her, telling the New York Daily News in July that she started dating him about two years ago, began using drugs and pulled away from her relatives.
"He was very weird, very strange, always distant, he was always very isolated to a corner. But we didn't pay mind to that, we were just happy she was around," her sister, Ana Javier, told the Daily News. Severino never reached out to her family after her sister's death to find out what had happened, Javier said.
It turned out Severino fled to Florida, and was arrested Aug. 14 on a reentry of deported aliens charge, according to federal court documents and law enforcement sources.
Severino, who was born in the Dominican Republic, has never been a U.S. citizen, court documents allege. In 2006, he served time in state prison in a stolen credit card case, and in March 2014, he was convicted of drug possession with intent to sell in Manhattan and sentenced to 42 months. He was deported Oct. 18, 2016.
Severino, who also went by the name Louis Santana, Julio Torres and Luis Manuel Severino Colon, got back into the U.S., and showed up in the Bronx, federal prosecutors said. The New York Police Department let Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials know on July 26 that he was under investigation for a June 15 crime, according to a federal complaint.
Severino appeared in Bronx Supreme Court Monday to face murder and manslaughter charges, and was returned to federal custody.
