Authorities in New York City arrested a man accused of killing his pregnant girlfriend and dumping her body on the side of an expressway in Queens, where it was discovered last Friday (October 23). Goey Charles, 29, was taken into custody on Monday and was charged with second-degree murder after making "incriminating statements" to investigators.
Neighbors said there were police vehicles outside of Charles' Long Island home, and he was seen getting into a squad car but was not handcuffed.
After taking Charles into custody, the NYPD released surveillance camera footage, which captured him pulling over to the side Horace Harding Expressway and dragging the body of his 29-year-old girlfriend, Vanessa Pierre, out of the car and leaving it facedown on the sidewalk.
First responders found a sweatshirt wrapped around her neck, and her cause of death was determined to be asphyxia due to compression of the neck. Pierre was six months pregnant, and her unborn baby could not be saved.
"It's horrible what happened," Pierre's father Herlin Pierre told the New York Daily News. "She was pregnant too. She was six months — that's what she told me. It looks like I lost two people. I was prepared to have a baby shower for her, and that's the bad news I heard."
Authorities did not provide any motive for the gruesome murder.