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The teenager stabbed and set on fire in the Bronx had recently been dating his alleged killer’s 14-year-old sister, law enforcement sources and the family said Thursday.
Adones Betances — who lives about five blocks from alleged victim Winston Ortiz, 18 — was enraged by the age gap between the two, the sources said.
He’s accused of stabbing Ortiz three times before dousing him with gasoline and lighting him on fire on the fifth floor of a Highbridge building near their homes Wednesday afternoon.
Sources said Bentances, 22, walked into the building just 10 minutes before Ortiz as part of a planned attack.
“I still can’t believe it. What goes through your mind to do something like that?,” Ortiz’s younger brother, Wilmer, 17, said outside the family’s apartment Thursday night.
He confirmed that his brother had been in a relationship with the suspect’s younger sister, but said that she’d ended it Wednesday.
“I’m pretty sure this all had to do with a breakup that he had been dealing with yesterday,” Wilmer said. “This is [his ex-girlfriend’s] older brother we’re talking about.”
The teen said he didn’t remember why the girl broke things off with his brother, but that it was “something about him being too overprotective,” adding, “But I don’t know what that means.”
His brother, a student at Metropolitan Lifehouse Charter School, had been “very emotionally distraught” over the split, Wilmer said.
The teen’s screams around 3 p.m. Wednesday alerted neighbors, who doused the flames with buckets of water.
Police said Ortiz was stabbed twice in the back and once in the chest and suffered burns over 90 percent of his body.
The dying teenager identified his alleged killer when cops got to the scene, according to sources — who said Betances casually took his girlfriend out to dinner after the fatal attack.
“No amount of criminal punishment will make up for the fact that he took a life away,” said the victim’s brother. “I’m sad someone felt obligated to do this.”
Betances claimed he was framed following his arrest Thursday. He is being held on murder and manslaughter charges.
Source: New York Post
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