Sarah Coit
BUTCHER: Sarah Coit (inset) was killed — stabbed 30 times — by boyfriend Raul Barrera in her Lower East Side apartment. (
)
The image of his murdered daughter’s face — frozen in terror — will never leave him, a Connecticut man wants a Manhattan judge to know.
Lynde Coit, a lawyer from Greenwich, brought his raw grief to court today in hopes that the boyfriend who butchered her on the Lower East Side last year will never see the light of day.
“When I identified Sarah’s body in the basement of the morgue,” he told the judge, “her injuries, the look on her face, the terror, will haunt me for the rest of my life and haunt the rest of her family.”
Sarah Coit was 23 and working her dream job in marketing for the designer label Lacoste when her boyfriend, Raul Barrera, 33, brought months of broken bones and black eyes to a climax, stabbing her some 30 times in her Clinton Street apartment.
Lynde Coit had traveled to the city to face his daughter over a table at her favorite local pizzeria.
The face he saw instead, at the city morgue, was crisscrossed by gashes. Her perfect teeth were bared in a grimace, the tip of a kitchen knife broken off in her skull.
“Love you,” the dad testified, recalling his final text to Sarah, sent as he prepared to head to the city.
“She had already been dead for eight hours,” the prosecutor told the judge.
Barrera, who pleaded guilty four days ago, killed Sarah with “breathtaking viciousness,” prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers, who will decide the murderer’s fate.
“There were so many soul-shattering screams, that half a dozen New Yorkers got out of their beds at 2:30 in the morning,” Bogdanos said.
These neighbors roamed their hall, calling, “Where are you? Where are you?”
“Help! Help me!” Sarah kept screaming, according to witness testimony.
It was 35 minutes after her first screams when a cop knocked on her door and asked, “Are you OK?”
“A voice called back weakly, ‘No,’ ” the prosecutor told the judge.
“Can you come to the door?” the officer asked.
Again, weakly came the response, “No,” the last word Sarah ever spoke.
“Sarah Coit was still alive in a puddle of blood,” the prosecutor said, as cops broke down her door.
One of Barerra’s stab wounds had partially eviscerated her.
The floor was littered with knives — bent and broken knives now on the prosecution’s table in five cardboard evidence boxes for the duration of the several-day-long hearing.
Barrera can be sentenced to anywhere from the mandatory minimum of 15 years to life in prison to the maximum, 25 to life.
The defense is expected to argue that Barrera deserves leniency because of mental-health issues.
Barerra has only a minor misdemeanor assault in his criminal history. A woman with whom he has a child had called cops on him several times but never pressed charges.
“Domestic violence is not just a criminal-justice issue, it’s a national health crisis,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance told reporters after sitting in on the father’s testimony.
“Enforcement alone is not going to be the answer — we need prevention and outreach,” he said.
His office is collaborating on a multiagency Family Justice Center that would offer victims counseling and social services in addition to the opportunity to meet with prosecutors, he said.
There were 92 domestic violence-related homicides citywide last year, he said.