First published on PIX11
BROOKLYN – PIX11 Investigates – working along with “Crime Watch Daily,” on the unsolved, 2006 strangulation of a teen honors student – has learned the NYPD and Brooklyn District Attorney’s office are reviewing multiple “cold cases” in New York City to determine whether Caribbean murder suspect, Veron Primus, could be a serial killer.
“This is a big one,” a law enforcement source told PIX11. “We are pursuing every cold case that may be linked to him.”
The 2006 case – involving Primus’ former classmate Chanel Petro Nixon of Bedford-Stuyvesant – has exploded to the forefront again, after a young woman was rescued April 15 from a mountain home on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Mewanah Hadaway told investigators Primus, 29, locked her in a wooden enclosure for three months. She was dating Primus last summer and told detectives he showed her a 2006 news clipping from the Petro-Nixon case.
Crime Watch Daily flew PIX11’s Mary Murphy to St. Vincent to get the back story. Murphy interviewed the former captive. Hadaway’s harrowing story will be presented on Crime Watch Daily Monday at 2 p.m. It airs on PIX 11 in New York and different times in cities around the U.S.
At this point, Primus has been charged with one murder on the island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the November 2015 fatal stabbing of real estate agent, Sharleen Greaves. He had been deported to St. Vincent just last June, after completing state prison time in New York, for violating an “order of protection” secured by an ex-girlfriend.
Investigators in New York and the Caribbean think Primus has exhibited a pattern of behavior with ex-girlfriends and other females that involves rage. His family had lived for years in a Crown Heights, Brooklyn brownstone.
Primus was accused of the St. Vincent murder on April 22, a week after police made a disturbing discovery inside his aunt’s mountain home.
On April 15, St. Vincent police found a 24-year-old woman locked in a small room in the house. Hadaway said he refused to let her leave on New Year’s Day. When she tried to escape, she told PIX11 he repeatedly assaulted her. Primus was accused on April 29 of kidnapping and rape.
Hadaway said Primus even took cell phone video of a grave that he dug and threatened to bury her in.
The way that Hadaway was rescued involved an ingenious plan – and you will hear her incredible story during the interview on Crime Watch Daily Monday at 2 p.m. on PIX 11.
Primus has long been the main “person of interest” in the 2006 strangulation of 16-year-old Petro-Nixon. She knew Primus from middle school. Their families attended a Seventh Day Adventist Church. Primus was three years older than Chanel.
On Father’s Day 2006, Petro-Nixon told her mother, Lucita, and her best friend that she was going to meet Primus and file job applications at an Applebee’s restaurant on Fulton Street. Chanel never came home.
Detectives initially characterized her as a runaway on a police report. Petro-Nixon’s friend said Primus claimed the girl “stood him up.”
Four days later, Chanel’s body was found in a trash bag on the sidewalk outside 212 Kingston Ave., less than a mile from her home. A sanitation man had tried to lift the bag and told a woman resident on the block she needed to break up the trash. When she opened the bag, she discovered Chanel’s body.
“It was folded over in a fetal position,” Brooklyn North homicide detective, Chris Scandole, recalled to PIX 11 in 2014, when we did a review of the unsolved case.
Rev. Taharka Robinson, a Brooklyn minister, called Chanel “the best our community had to offer.” He held marches for justice with Petro-Nixon’s family and friends, seeking information on the murder. Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network raised reward money. The Petro-Nixon case was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and the Nancy Grace program on CNN.
Now, because of a rescue in the Caribbean, there could be new hope for a resolution in the Petro-Nixon case.
During the Crime Watch Daily broadcast, viewers will also meet the woman who found the cry for help from the alleged captive on St. Vincent.
