Just before 5 p.m. on July 5, the NYPD responded to a report of a mysterious package outside a building in the city’s Kips Bay neighborhood. There, beside a pile of garbage, officers found the body of Yazmeen Williams wrapped in a sleeping bag inside a trash bag. On Monday, the medical examiner determined that Williams, 31, had been shot in the head and ruled her death a homicide, angering the Manhattan community where she grew up and still lived.
Hours later, police took Chad Irish, a man who lives in the neighborhood, into custody for questioning, according to ABC7. Some neighbors told the New York Times that Irish, who is 55 and uses a power wheelchair, and Williams were a couple; others told CBS News that Williams was friends with a man who used a wheelchair. But her family told the Times that they didn’t know Irish.
Irish was escorted out of the Straus Houses, a public-housing development a block away from where Williams’s body was found, on a stretcher on Monday. A crowd of at least 50, including Williams’s relatives and neighbors, swarmed him and tried to attack him, according to the Times. Video of the scene shows people punching Irish in the head and face; the Times reports that others grabbed his pants and ripped his shirt as police and EMTs tried to hold them back. Williams’s mother, Nicole Williams, could be heard in the crowd screaming, “You killed my daughter! Please kill him!” and “She didn’t deserve that. She was a good daughter. She was my best friend,” according to the newspaper.
Irish was charged Tuesday with a slew of crimes linked to Williams’s death, including concealment of a human corpse, criminal possession of a weapon, and menacing. (It’s unclear if Irish has an attorney.) He has 21 prior arrests going back to the ’90s and is on parole after being released from prison two years ago, according to media reports. While police haven’t said where Williams was killed, they are reportedly trying to determine if it was in Irish’s apartment. CBS News aired security-camera footage that shows a man in a wheelchair dragging a long trash bag down the street, although it’s not clear when the video was recorded.
Williams grew up and lived two blocks away from where police discovered her body. Her mother told the Times that “whoever killed her might think she was someone who didn’t have a family, that no one’s going to look out for her,” but “this is where she grew up. Everybody knows her.” Williams graduated from Buffalo State University with a degree in criminal justice and was supposed to start a job at the New York City Housing Authority this week, her aunt told the newspaper.
Mayor Eric Adams reacted to her death, saying that even though he doesn’t know if Irish killed Williams, he “should be lucky that the police got him before that community.” He added that Williams’s death was “a tragic loss.”