Riots in the streets as man in wheelchair arrested for murder

Riots broke out on a Manhattan street on Monday when a man in a wheelchair was arrested on suspicion of murdering a young woman whose body was found wrapped in a blue sleeping bag days earlier.

At least 50 neighbors and family members of 31-year-old Yazmeen Williams surrounded police as they placed the man on a stretcher and carried him out of an apartment building in the Straus Houses, a public housing complex on East 28th Street near Second Avenue. Some got so close that they punched him in the face, grabbed his jeans and ripped the back of his blue-and-yellow striped shirt. Police and emergency workers held out their arms to keep the crowd at bay.

Some of the loudest screams came from Ms. Williams’ mother, Nicole Williams.

“You killed my daughter! Please kill him!” she screamed.

“She didn’t deserve this,” her mother said. “She was a good daughter. She was my best friend.”

The man, whose name has not yet been released by police, was considered one of the people of interest in connection with the woman’s death on Monday but has not been charged. Neighbors said he and Yazmeen Williams were a couple, but the family said they did not know him.

Just before 5 p.m. on Friday, officers responded to a report of a suspicious package outside an apartment building on East 27th Street in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. When police arrived, they discovered Ms. Williams’ body wrapped in a sleeping bag next to a pile of trash.

The city’s medical examiner determined that Ms. Williams had been shot in the head and her death was ruled a homicide, police said.

Before police arrested the man, about 10 family members gathered Monday afternoon at the apartment where Ms. Williams grew up on Second Avenue, about two blocks from where her body was found.

Her aunt, Nisha Ramirez, said Ms. Williams had a degree in criminal justice from Buffalo State University and had just started a job with the New York City Housing Authority.

Ms. Ramirez was standing in the hallway of the 10th-floor apartment. She paused as Nicole Williams, who was inside the building, screamed and sobbed.

“This is not just someone who was thrown in the trash. She was a human being. She had a college education. She had a family,” Ms. Ramirez said. “Whoever killed her probably thought she had no family and no one was looking out for her. This is where she grew up. Everyone knows her.”

When Ms. Ramirez and Nicole Williams received a call that a man connected to Ms. Williams’ murder had been arrested around the corner, they ran out the door and down the block to the building on East 28th Street. They joined neighbors who were already outside waiting for the police to take the man out.

Then they saw through the first floor windows how he was taken out on a stretcher. They banged on the glass.

After the ambulance took the man away, Nicole Williams spoke again about her daughter.

“She was an angel. She was a light,” said the mother. “She will live with me forever.”