Heartbreaking photos posted on social media show a mom and her two young sons cuddling just a few months before police said they were stabbed to death by their husband and their father, who then turned a knife on himself at their home in New York.
Alexandra “Ola” Witek, 40, can be seen cradling her sons — 3-year-old Lucian and then-6-month-old Calvin against her chest while sitting on a bench in a photo uploaded to Facebook on Jan. 3.
“They’re the best,” the doting mom said of her children, in response to a friend’s congratulatory comment.
Witek was found fatally stabbed in her fourth-floor apartment on Monday afternoon, August 28 along with her two boys.
Police believe Witek’s husband and the boys’ father, Edison Lopez, 41, killed his family before fatally stabbing himself.
The kids’ bodies were so ravaged in the attack that they were initially misidentified as a boy and a girl, the sources said.
Neighbors said Lopez and Witek had grown up in the neighborhood together and even went to the same high school.
Her dad used to be a doorman across the street, and his father was the super of the couple’s building until Lopez took over for him.
Both were first-generation Americans, with Lopez’s family hailing from Venezuela and Witek’s roots being in Poland.
“They grew up here,” a family friend, who said he had been a super on the same block for 35 years, told The Post, adding that he was “shaking inside.”
“This is crazy,” the distraught man said. “I have known him since he was a little boy and she was a little girl. I have seen them together when they were young.”
“I didn’t see this coming. I’ve never seen [Lopez] angry, never. I’ve never seen them fighting,” the family friend said in disbelief.
Jimmy, the block’s longtime postman, was also shocked by the news of the family’s grisly demise.
“I used to deliver his pampers for the baby, the one-year-old. I used to chat with him, ‘How are you doing Edison? How is everything?’ He’d say, ‘OK.’ I always asked him, ‘How is the family?’ He’d always say, ‘Good,’” he told The Post.
“That’s not in his character,” Jimmy continued.
“[Lopez] was always nice…calm. You don’t see nothing that would lead, let’s say, trigger something like this. I feel sad.
“How can you do this, not only to yourself but do it to your kids and your wife?”
Before the suspected murder-suicide, the family had no emergency call history that indicated domestic troubles at home.
An acquaintance of the couple has also shared a photo of Lopez lined up as a groomsman and grinning in an undated image.
The family of four was found when Lopez’s father called Witek’s younger brother after being unable to reach the family since Sunday.
The pair alerted authorities when they drilled through the apartment lock and saw blood inside.
“He went in the other building to get a hammer. He came back out real fast and he went back over there [to the apartment]. That’s when he probably saw it,” the longtime family friend said of the moments just before Lopez’s father entered the crime scene.
Lucian and Calvin were subsequently found stabbed to death in the living room with two knives nearby, sources said, while Witek was found in the hallway with a deep neck wound.
Lopez was discovered lying on the bed in a bedroom, also with a stab wound.
The apartment door was locked from the inside, police said.
The family may have been facing pressure to move out of their apartment in the weeks before the shocking incident as Lopez had apparently gotten a new job in Westchester, acquaintances said Tuesday.
“I saw him on Friday…he said he was leaving for another job and they were giving him like two weeks to get out,” the family friend, who declined to give his name, recalled of his last interaction with Lopez.
“He was upset or something…like, worried. I have never seen him like that,” the super said.
