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A Bronx gunman killed his girlfriend who was trying to leave him and then himself — all while she was on the phone with her father and crying for help, the devastated dad told the Daily News Wednesday.
The father was able to call 911 at 9:04 p.m. Tuesday with his 37-year-old daughter Andrea Cantarini still on the other line.
“I was on the phone with her for 14 minutes while he was holding a gun to her head,” her father, Rudy Cantarini told the Daily News. “I was begging for her life. And he ended up taking her life.”
“She wanted to break up with him and he couldn’t handle it,” he added. “He’s a coward.”
Her 38-year-old boyfriend, federal Customs and Border Protection Officer Juan Cornelio Diaz, shot Andrea in the head and then did the same thing to himself inside their upscale new apartment on Blackstone Ave. near W. 239th St. in Riverdale, officials said.
Police said Andrea called her father and told him her boyfriend was trying to kill her, at which point he called 911 on another line and told the dispatcher what was happening.
“Of course he heard me,” the father said of his daughter’s killer. “She put it on speaker. I was just begging him to let her go. He just wouldn’t do it. And then I heard a gunshot. And then I heard the phone fall and that’s it in a nutshell.”
The victim was a nurse at St. Barnabas Hospital and she and her killer, who she had been with for a decade, were parents of a 6-year-old girl. Cornelio Diaz worked at a local airport as a customs and border patrol officer, the feds confirmed.
When police got to the scene the couple were dead at the scene.
Andrea was trying to leave her boyfriend when she was killed.
“She had brought her (daughter) here yesterday morning,” Rudy said. “(Her boyfriend) was acting a little irrational. And then after that, she went to go get clothes. She thought he was working. She went to go get clothes and he was waiting for her in ambush. She called me up and I saw my poor daughter was murdered. It’s very hard.”
“She was the apple of our eye and now she’s gone,” he added. “She was beautiful person inside and out and she was loved by everybody that knew her.”
The couple had no history of domestic incidents involving police, NYPD officials said. They had just moved into the two-bedroom apartment in the last couple weeks from a one-bedroom unit in the same complex, neighbors said. The couple was excited for their daughter to have their own room.
“We heard the gunshots but we assumed it was trucks because the Henry Hudson is right behind us. We thought trucks had backfired,” said the couple’s 30-year-old downstairs neighbor, who gave her name only as Kaela. We kind of knew, but we were trying to explain it away. We also heard the thuds of the bodies, which we didn’t know at the time it was that.”
“It’s awful and upsetting and horrific,” she added. “It’s a scary world.”
Kaela overheard the couple in a loud argument earlier in the week.
“Me and my roommate were having a conversation about like, at what point do we call the cops?” she said. “And then as soon as we had that conversation they stopped.”
Neighbors in their old building, where the victim had lived for a decade, said they seemed like a happy successful family.
“I always saw them together,” Karla Evangelista, 29, who bonded with the victim over both being young mothers. “She was very fit, gym girl, always with gym clothes … She was just amazing and so beautiful.”
“I still don’t understand what led to this” she added.
“I honestly was so shocked that I didn’t sleep, because it was not the people I would have thought that would do that and that that would happen to her. They seemed like they had a nice relationship and they were so happy to move, to have now a bigger space for their daughter … He was saying to my boyfriend, ‘We’re so happy because now she’s gonna have her room.’”
Cornelio Diaz was athletic, talkative and friendly, she said.
“He was a good-looking guy, always wearing nice clothes, always biking or running,” she said. “He was outside with his daughter sometimes, playing right here in the parking lot. Would talk to us for like the longest, maybe an hour, standing there, just talking, catching up. I’m telling you, I never thought this.”
Evangalista was relieved the tragic couple’s daughter was not present for the murder-suicide.
“It’s so sad because they took away her life, basically, she said. “She’s alive, but this is gonna be very sad.”
Other neighbors also expressed concern for the couple’s daughter.
“She was a sweet little girl,” said a 71-year-old neighbor who declined to give his name. “She was a happy little girl and she seemed to love both of her parents a great deal. They seemed to be very affectionate towards her. I would’ve never have imagined this.”
NewsID: HaroldMIA75Down
