She broke his heart — then her lover drove a knife through it.
Slain Bronx resident Luis Cartagena was bickering with his girlfriend over her alleged infidelity moments before the guy she was sneaking around with stabbed him in the heart, according to victim’s grieving mother.
“She cheated on my son with that guy before,” Muneca Sanchez told the Daily News on Tuesday night. “I can’t believe it. She was in my house earlier in the day. What kind of people are these?
“He got stabbed in the heart and the chest,” she added.
Police cuffed Joseph Roberts on charges of murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon for allegedly plunging a knife into the 26-year-old Bronx man on Tuesday.
Cartagena was riding in his girlfriend’s black Hyundai when the pair arrived at 3 a.m. ET at her Radio Drive home near Lucerne St., where they found Roberts parked in an SUV waiting for them, according to a neighbor.
“He was here first,” said the neighbor, who lives across the street from the girlfriend’s home. “He was waiting for them.”
Roberts, who was blasting music from his SUV as he waited outside his ex’s home, confronted Cartagena and the pair began shouting at each other, the witness said.
Their dispute came to blows and Roberts pulled a knife, which he repeatedly plunged into Cartagena’s chest as his girlfriend’s screams rang out through the neighborhood, the neighbor recounted.
“The kid was lying on the street stabbed in the stomach right over there,” the neighbor said. “I heard the girl’s screams.”
Sanchez said she had called her son minutes before the fight occurred and listened over speakerphone to both the argument between Cartagena and his girlfriend, and the fight with Roberts that would end in her son’s death.
“I can’t believe I heard the fight over the speakerphone,” said the victim’s mother. “I heard the commotion, I heard the fight.”
After frantically dialing her son and the girlfriend, the woman picked up and relayed the chilling news.
“She said don’t come over here, go to the hospital, because your son was stabbed in front of my house,’ Sanchez recalled.
The next time she saw her son, it was through a window at Jacobi Hospital.
“They wouldn’t let me touch my son,” said the sobbing mother. “They only let me look at his body through the glass.”
Roberts hopped in his car and sped off following the incident. Cops said they found him at his home a short time later and took him into custody.
Cartagena leaves behind a 5-year-old girl. As of late Tuesday, she still did not know her father was dead.
Sanchez said, “We’re not ready to sit down with a little girl and tell her her daddy is dead. She loved him and he loved her with all his heart.”
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