A 38-year-old woman was found deceased in a New York City hotel room next to a bloody iron, and her teenage son said she had been acting “nervous” and “worried” in the days leading up to her death.
Staff at the SoHo 54 Hotel found Denisse Oleas-Arancibia’s lifeless body with “trauma to her face” at around 10:30 a.m. Thursday, police sources told the New York Daily News.
While the manner of the woman’s death is unclear, police say they are investigating the case as a homicide.
“There were no signs of forced entry, but a bloody iron was found near her body,” the outlet reported.
Edwin Cevallos, 18, said he last spoke to his mother the day before her untimely death.
“In the week [before], she was like, sad. She was so nervous, and she was worried,” Cevallos told the publication in Spanish, adding that he did not know if her odd behavior was connected to the tragedy.
Detectives are attempting to track down the owner of a pair of bloody pants found inside the room, according to an ABC7 report.
“My mom, she worked very hard,” said Cevallos, adding that he did not know what his mother did for a living or why she was in the hotel. “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,” the heartbroken teen said as he cried. “She always had money to cover anything in the house. She didn’t owe no money to anybody.”
“All I knew is that every day at 2:00 p.m., she went to Manhattan to work,” he said, describing how he called the police on Thursday after she did not return home.
“A cop showed up at his house not long after then took him to Manhattan to break the news she had been found dead hours earlier,” the New York Daily News reported.
An autopsy has been ordered to determine how Oleas-Arancibia died.
Oleas-Arancibia’s 13-year-old son and both of her parents still live in Ecuador. She came to the U.S. five years ago and brought her elder son three years later.
“She wanted a better life because in Ecuador is a lot of bad people. It was so dangerous,” Cevallos said. “She gave us the life that we always wanted.”