Family, community hold vigil to remember 1st-grade teacher shot, killed in her Bronx apartment
WILLIAMSBRIDGE, The Bronx (WABC) -- A community came together Monday night in the Bronx to remember a first-grade teacher who was murdered in her own home last week.
The outpouring of love for Jessica Hoyle, and of support for those who appreciated her, is keeping Lisa Cabassa hanging on nearly a week after she heard the gunshot upstairs that killed her 31-year-old daughter.
Hoyle was a first-grade teacher at a Bronx charter school.
"I know that everybody loved her," Cabassa said. "She was a good person, and she took care of those kids."
Her mom lived downstairs from Hoyle and says it wasn't just her students that she took such great care of.
"I had a heart attack and everything, and she was there with me, and she always took care of me here," Cabassa said.
"I wish she was here. I miss Jessica so much. She was my sister," said the victim's sister Rachel Hoyle.
Police believe Hoyle's ex-boyfriend shot her in the head last Tuesday, inside the upstairs apartment on Mickle Avenue, where candles remained from Monday afternoon's vigil.
Her mom couldn't get up the stairs in her wheelchair but called 911, and suspected it was not an intruder, but the troubled man her daughter had broken up with.
"He was a monster, and he wanted to come back, now," Cabassa said. "So, I told him, you can't come here. To do what? You have to stay away from here, you've got to take care of yourself."
The NYPD says the investigation is ongoing and they haven't formally identified the ex-boyfriend, but sources told Eyewitness News he is no longer a danger to anyone, because he was found dead of what was believed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, two days after the tragedy here.
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