By David Lohr
(Continued)
Cordero and Tumi met in 2005, while she was attending The Beacon School, an alternative public high school on the West Side of Manhattan. Before long, the couple began dating, and they were soon inseparable.
To friends, the couple made an odd pair. Tumi, the daughter of two highly successful NYU professors, grew up in Greenwich Village. When she graduated high school, she enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she was a political studies student. She had several goals in life and was determined to make something of herself.
Cordero, on the other hand, seemed to lack motivation and had few goals in life. His family was poor, and he grew up in a crime-ridden housing project behind Lincoln Center. He never graduated high school, and according to police, he was arrested twice in recent years on drug charges. His last job was a security guard at a music store in Lower Manhattan.
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| Michael A. Cordero & Boitumelo McCallum |
Yesterday, NYdailynews.com published the text of several handwritten letters Tumi and Cordero had exchanged over the past few years. Within them, Cordero appears to be hot-tempered and jealous.
"Do I mean anything to you, or am I just another guy?" He wrote Tumi in one letter, adding, "How many times have you had unprotected sex? And with how many partners? The truth shall set you free."
Tumi's friends have long suspected problems in the relationship.
"She really protected him from us, because we were all so concerned," Tumi's friend, Alyse Woodard, 19, told the New York Daily News yesterday. "She loved so hard that she didn't ever want anything to be wrong with anyone. He didn't want her to be her; he wanted her to be his."
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