A Connecticut man suspected in the strangulation death of a Queens RN was arrested in a California hotel, where he allegedly tied up another woman in his room.
Samantha Stewart, 29, was found strangled to death in her apartment when her 2 brothers couldn’t reach her by phone on July 17. Family members suspected the killer was a man she met on a dating app, but they didn’t know his name.
Stewart had trauma to her neck and head. Her body was nude and wrapped in a blanket. Her teeth were knocked out and she had been badly beaten. She was a registered nurse who worked at North Shore University Hospital.
Members of a fugitive task force tracked Danueal Drayton, of New Haven, Connecticut, to a hotel room in California on Tuesday. “When they go to the room, they find another woman tied up in his room alive,” a police source told the NY Post.
Drayton, 27, was arrested without incident.
Stewart’s brother, Dewayne Stewart, 23, believes he 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 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.”
Drayton will be extradited to New York where he faces murder charges.
