Danuel Drayton, 27, the Connecticut man suspected of killing a Queens nurse, faces multiple charges of rape when he is extradited from California to New York.
Drayton was charged with strangling 29-year-old Samantha Stewart in her Jamaica, Queens apartment on July 17.
Stewart’s brothers found her body after they couldn’t reach her by phone and she failed to show up for work as a RN at North Shore Hospital in Manhasset.
Samantha’s 17-year-old brother, Keniel told the New York Post that he and his older brother, Dewayne Stewart, 23, discovered their sister’s body in an upstairs bedroom.
Stewart was strangled to death. Her naked body was wrapped in a blanket, she was badly beaten and her teeth were knocked out.
Family members suspected the killer was a man she met on a dating app, but they didn’t know his name.
Dewayne Stewart spoke to the murderer when he called his sister’s cell phone the day she was found dead.
“This guy picked up her phone. He told me he had her phone by accident and he had her car keys that she had left (for) our younger brother. So I told him I would come for them,” Stewart told the NY Daily News.
“I got there and he came downstairs he gave me the keys. I never met him before. He was kind of fidgety, but I wasn’t taking it that serious. He told me his name under his breath, but it was muffled. I can’t remember it. I didn’t think anything of it.”
A fugitive task force tracked Drayton to a California hotel on Tuesday, where they discovered another woman tied up in his room.
“When they go to the room, they find another woman tied up in his room alive,” a police source told the NY Post.
Police linked Stewart’s murder to a 23-year-old rape victim on 14th St. in Park Slope, Brooklyn, according to the NY Daily News.
The victim said she met Drayton through Tinder, a dating app typically used by men for sex hookups. He allegedly choked her unconscious and raped her.
“Two independent investigations that as they progressed led our detectives to the same individual,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said during a press conference Thursday. “That individual was tracked across the country.”
The fugitive squad found Drayton just in time to rescue the victim tied up in his room.
“They potentially saved her life,” Shea said.
