A 21-year-old plus-size cover girl apparently committed suicide inside her Manhattan apartment by stabbing herself several times in the neck, police said yesterday.
Natasha Duncan’s roommate found her body in the kitchen of their East 59th Street flat at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, cops said.
Duncan’s brother Alec said he spoke to her just five hours before the tragedy and she seemed upbeat – except when she complained about her boyfriend.
“She said she was having some problems with some guy she’d been seeing, some kickboxing instructor,” said Alec, 24, who spoke to his sister by phone from his home in Florida.
“She said he was messing with her mind. I told her she didn’t need him.”
Duncan’s roommate, Johanna Edelberg, another plus-size model, also told police that Duncan was upset about her beau, who was not identified.
Cops said Duncan had been smoking marijuana shortly before she killed herself.
Duncan began modeling for the Wilhelmina agency last year, and her career quickly took off.
The green-eyed, red-haired beauty was on the cover of Mode magazine last April, and appears in a fashion spread in the magazine’s August issue.
Edelberg, 20, told cops that she and Duncan were talking about going to a movie Saturday night.
Edelberg went briefly into her bedroom, then came out a few minutes later and went into the kitchen, cops said.
The stunned model found Duncan’s body on the floor of the kitchen, face up in a pool of blood, with a 12-inch kitchen knife lying nearby.
It appeared Duncan had stabbed herself several times in the neck, and police were treating her death as a suicide.
Police said there was no suicide note but they found something written by Duncan that indicated she was depressed.
Yesterday, there were bloody footprints in the hall outside the third-floor apartment where Duncan lived for the last year.
“She was a really a nice person, so beautiful. This thing is really weird,” said neighbor Meir Saba.
Duncan’s brother Alec said, “I’m dumbfounded, I don’t understand it.
“She was making plans for the future. She was very happy. She’d just been in Houston this past week doing a modeling thing for a JCPenney catalog. She had all kinds of jobs going. She was in Mode, in Seventeen. It doesn’t make any sense.”
He said his sister chatted on the phone Saturday about plans to meet in Washington next month and asked his advice about buying a new computer.
Duncan was born in New York and grew up in Connecticut, France and Florida, returning to New York after high school with dreams of becoming an actress.
Bill Swan, Mode’s photo director, said Duncan was “absolutely gorgeous.”
“It was all sort of new to her, so she was very excited about it. Her career took off very fast.”