BAKARY CAMARA
Caged at least 25 years. (Steven Hirsch)
“You son of a bitch!”
A Manhattan chef who came home last November to discover his fiancée’s raped and slashed corpse blasted her murderer yesterday in a scorching — and at times heartbreaking — victim-impact statement as the monster was sentenced to 25 years to life behind bars.
“I was her life, and she was mine,” Fernando Vargas, 37, wrote of victim Rita Morelli (pictured), 36, a beautiful Italian woman in New York studying art history on a student visa.
Vargas was a chef at Caffe Buon Gusto on the Upper East Side and Morelli was a waitress and manager there, as well as a student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
“Every day when I get home and she is not there, I start crying and thinking how I was not there to take care of her and protect her and kill that son of a bitch,” said Vargas, who wiped tears from his eyes and visibly trembled in Manhattan Supreme Court, as a Spanish translator read his letter aloud at the sentencing of Bakary Camara, 42.
“I would bury this son of a bitch for the rest of his life in prison,” Vargas, who had been with Morelli almost three years, said in his letter.