NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — A 19-year-old man has been arrested in the grisly February murder of a college student from Brooklyn who was found shot in the head and burned on freight train tracks, police said Friday.
Isiah Baez was busted Thursday night and charged with murder, criminal possession of a weapon and tampering with physical evidence in the death of DeAndre Matthews, also 19.
Matthews, who was reported missing on Feb. 6, was discovered dead the next day from a gunshot wound to the head, with "significant burn wounds throughout his body," on tracks on Nostrand Avenue — just steps away from Brooklyn College.
The city's medical examiner also revealed Matthews suffered smoke inhalation.
According to NBC New York, his sister, Dajanae Gillespie, said he left his job at Buggy Service Center in Crown Heights around 5 p.m. on Feb. 6 and went home to borrow their mother's Jeep for the night.
Gillespie was one of the last people to speak to her brother on the phone before he went missing.
"I want to know why [the killer] did it," Gillespie told the station in February. "What was the reason? DeAndre wasn't a violent person. This wasn't for retaliation. He wasn't in the streets."
Gillespie added that she believed the killing was a hate crime because her brother was gay. A motive for the murder remains unclear, and Baez does not face any hate crime charges.
Danielle Matthews, DeAndre's mother, located the Jeep with GPS outside a warehouse on Troy Avenue. It was also burned.
The SUNY Broome Community College student was known for his love of people and his sense of humor, according to the report. His family said he wanted to become a social worker.
"Now, as a mother, I'm suffering. My daughter don't have a big brother. My sister don't have a nephew, my mother don't have a grandson," the mother told NBC New York at the time.
Baez's arrest was just the latest update in the case. Remy McPrecia, a 24-year-old accomplice, was charged last week with concealment of a human corpse and tampering with physical evidence, police said.
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