The au pair’s boyfriend was arrested Sunday and charged with two counts of murder.
Police in Maplewood, New Jersey, responded to a 911 call around sunrise Saturday about a woman being assaulted. After arriving at the scene, officers found the woman, Karen L. Bermudez-Rodriguez, 26, lying in the street critically injured.
They later found the homeowner, David Kimowitz, 40, dead inside the house, the Essex County prosecutor’s office said.
Bermudez-Rodriguez, an au pair for the Kimowitz family’s children, was pronounced dead at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. The family’s two young daughters and Kimowitz’s wife, Laura, were not at home at the time of the attack, authorities said.
On Sunday, Joseph D. Porter, 27, Bermudez-Rodriguez’s boyfriend, was charged in connection with the deaths and was booked into the Essex County Correctional Facility.
The killings were a stunning event in a suburb known as a safe place to raise children. Over the last three decades, there had been only 15 homicides in Maplewood, a town of about 25,000 people approximately 20 miles west of New York City, before Saturday, according to state and federal authorities.
Neighbors of the Kimowitz family, who had bought the two-story colonial-style house on a corner lot in 2017, said that their family’s daughters were often seen playing outside with Bermudez-Rodriguez.
On Sunday, friends placed flowers outside the house, at the intersection of Walton Road and Jefferson Avenue.
Andrew De la Torre, who lived near the Kimowitzes, said that the family had employed several au pairs, who rotated every few months, since they moved into the house.
“They have a little balcony that they would be playing out there with their kids,” De la Torre said Sunday. “They’d have family friends over. Really nice people.”
Kimowitz was well-known in the New York comedy scene, as both a manager of comedians and one of four founders of the Stand Restaurant and Comedy Club, a comedy venue near Gramercy Park in Manhattan.
While the biggest club in town, the Comedy Cellar, attracted comedy elite like Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle, the Stand maintained a steady rotation of high-profile performers including Tracy Morgan, Janeane Garofalo and Dave Attell. “There’s a stigma about comedy clubs,” Kimowitz told The New York Times in an interview in 2012. “They’re tourist traps, watered-down drinks. We’re trying to evolve the comedy club.”
The Stand closed its Gramercy Park location last year and reopened a few weeks ago in a fancier and larger space near Union Square. The founders added an upscale restaurant in an attempt to differentiate itself from other clubs. The club also has a green room — a rarity in most clubs — and two rooms with low ceilings for intimate performances.
In 2012, Kimowitz and the same group that had opened the Stand started the Standing Room comedy club in Long Island City, Queens. While they had hoped to attract top comedians to perform there, the Standing Room could not replicate the success of the Manhattan venue and closed last summer.
Comedians who knew Kimowitz said that they were stunned by the news of his death.
“A great guy and friend has passed this weekend,” Rich Vos, a comedian, said on Twitter. “He seemed so happy, a wife, 2 kids, his new club opened.”
A LinkedIn page for Kimowitz said that he had received a bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia University in New York in 2002 and had joined several comedy ventures, including a company called Cringe Humor, which had started the Stand. He was also a partner of CH Entertainment, a talent agency with clients that included Vos. The group previously represented comedian Pete Davidson.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.