Still reeling from grief over the death of a brother who fell between cars of a Bronx subway train, Cori Lowe tried to help a cousin having a mental breakdown — and paid with his life.
Lowe, a 31-year-old nursing assistant and the father of a 2-year-old boy, ventured out to a relative’s home on E. 232nd St. near White Plains Road in Wakefield Tuesday night to try and talk down his cousin.
The cousin, who was close friends with Lowe, had been making increasingly alarming posts on Facebook.
“Please don’t frame me for murder,” Lawrence Hyde posted Tuesday morning, about 12 hours before he was arrested for murder for allegedly stabbing Lowe. “I know why all of this is happening. It’s ALWAYS the ones closest to u!”
Worried relatives had tried to help as Hyde’s sanity unraveled in recent months.
“Do not allow anyone to put you in this state,” a concerned relative messaged Hyde earlier this year. “Can we all just sit and talk to you? We can have it on zoom if you want? We’re your family we can help you.”
When Lowe showed up in person to intervene about 7:30 p.m., Hyde allegedly stabbed him multiple times.
Lowe died a short time later at Montefiore Medical Center, the same hospital he worked at for more than a decade.
For Lowe’s mother, the loss is unbearable. Just five weeks ago, she lost her other son.
“We’re going through a lot right now,” she said before closing the family’s Bronx apartment door Wednesday, overcome with grief.
Lowe’s brother Duval Lowe, who worked at Chase Bank, slipped on July 31 at about 12:20 a.m. while walking between cars on a No. 2 subway train near the West Farms station.
Two women alerted the conductor and cops canvassing the tracks found Duval, 36, on the tracks. He was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he died of his injuries.
“My brother, my best friend, my first friend, my protector, my hero,” Cori wrote on Facebook after Duval’s death. “Words can’t express the impact you made on me. Words can never express the LOVE you showed me nor the life lessons you taught me. I feel like you wished me into existence how bad you told our parents you wanted a little brother. And you never fell short of what a big brother embodied EVER.”
“My heart is completely torn into pieces,” Cori added. “This s— is never gonna make sense to me. I love you forever.”
Since his brother’s shocking death, Cori was determined to spend even more time with his 2-year-old son. He was separated from the boy’s mother, Emily Smith, 27, but the parents remained close.
“He loved Morgan to the bottom of his soul,” Smith told the Daily News. “He always was finding something for him and Morgan to do every weekend. The last conversation was: we literally came home Monday from being at his house and he said, ‘I miss my son. I literally miss him.’ And I said, ‘We just left!'”
Smith said Cori went to the apartment where he was killed as a peacemaker.
“He’s not the type of person to be physical or start fights,” Smith said of Lowe. “He barely got over the grief of losing his brother, so for him to be in that type of situation, it doesn’t make any sense.”
When first responders responded to Lowe’s slaying on Tuesday night firefighters extinguished a small kitchen fire relatives believe Hyde started.
An arraignment for Hyde, who lives in White Plains, was pending in Bronx Criminal Court Wednesday.
Lowe would call Smith in the evenings to check in on her and their son.
“I’m expecting a call between 7 and 9, and when I didn’t see the call I knew that something was wrong,” she said.
Then Lowe’s mother called with the news he had been stabbed.
“I just broke down,” Smith said. “Because I was like, ‘I can’t do this by myself. I don’t know what it’s like to be a single mother.”
Smith was sitting on the floor with their son when she got the call. Morgan crawled into her lap, sensing something was wrong.
Later, she showed Morgan a photo from Duval’s funeral as a way to try to explain his own father’s sudden death.
“It’s hard to explain to a 2-year-old,” Smith said. “I said, ‘Morgan, Daddy’s not here anymore.’ And he just looked, and he went quiet, and he went back to his iPad and kept watching his shows. He’s aware that something is wrong. He’s like Cori — they’re emotional.”
