The grandmother of the slain woman whose decomposing corpse was thrown in the trash outside a Manhattan apartment building warned the victim for months something was not right with the man the granddaughter was living with — who is now charged with concealing her corpse.
“I could feel it. I kept saying, ‘She needs to get out of that house,’” Essie Graham said of her slain granddaughter Yazmeen Williams. “I wanted someone to go over there and make a lot of noise. But nobody really took it seriously.”
Cops charged Chad Irish with concealment of a human corpse after he was identified as the man in a motorized wheelchair allegedly caught on video leaving the body next to trash bags outside an apartment building on E. 27th St. near Third Ave. in Kips Bay just before 5 p.m. Friday.
A gun Irish had with him when he was arrested was undergoing ballistics tests to see if it was the weapon used to shoot Williams, 31, in the head, a police source said.
The 55-year-old ex-con was attacked by a mob as he was taken out of his apartment building on E. 28th St. near Second Ave. by cops Monday.
In November, Williams moved out of her grandmother’s Kips Bay home and into Irish’s apartment two-and-a-half blocks away. Williams referred to Irish as her “homeboy,” her distraught grandmother said.
In the months leading up to Williams’ death, Graham began to worry about her granddaughter, who she believes was quietly in a relationship with the much-older Irish.
“She always said that he was her friend,” Graham said in an exclusive interview with the Daily News. “I think because she knew I wouldn’t approve.”
About a week before her body was found, Williams called her grandmother and told her she was moving back home.
“She told me, ‘Mama, I’m coming home’ and everything seemed fine,” Graham recalled. “If I knew, I would have made her come home.”
Graham, unable to shake the feeling something was wrong, had begun sending her grandson over to check on Williams a couple of times of week.
“Now that I look back I think God was letting me know she needed to get out of that house,” said Graham. “If I ever get that feeling again about my grandkids or anyone else, I’ll listen.”
Williams’ body was so badly decomposed police were not initially sure of the victim’s gender. Days later, the death was deemed a homicide and the victim was identified as Williams. Her body was found after neighbors complained of the smell.
Williams’ cause of death was deemed to be a gunshot to the head, which the Medical Examiner told her family came “at close range.”
Williams lived between her mother and grandmother’s apartments as a child. After graduating from Buffalo State College with a degree in criminal justice in 2016 she moved in fulltime with Graham. The slain woman lovingly referred to her grandmother as “Mama,” Graham recalled.
Video obtained by The News shows cops and medics carrying Irish out of the Kips Bay building on a stretcher and into police custody as a mob of people swarmed them.
The first responders battled to get through the crowd attacking Irish.
“When you die I want you to burn in hell,” Graham said. “My heart is broken and it’s never gonna be healed.”
Before her death, Williams was looking forward to starting a new job at a Manhattan courthouse, according to Graham.
“I’m proud of her,” she said of her granddaughter. “She was a beautiful girl. She had a good heart.”
“She had a long life ahead of her,” the devastated woman added.
