The abusive and jealous boyfriend of a beautiful co-ed found slain in her NYU-professor mom’s Greenwich Village apartment was arrested last night after trying to commit suicide on the roof of his family’s building, police said.
Michael Cordero, 23, was busted at 8:40 p.m. after he tried to slit his wrists with a razor blade on the roof of the Amsterdam Houses at 216 West 62nd Street.
Cordero fled from the roof pursued by family members and cops and was finally nabbed at a supermarket at West 62nd Street and West End Avenue.
He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where he allegedly confessed to the murder of Boitumelo “Tumi” McCallum, 20.
“I tried to kill myself because I killed my girlfriend,” he allegedly told hospital workers.
Charges against Cordero are pending.
He was in stable condition and was being interviewed by detectives while in custody at the hospital.
Earlier in the day, one of Cordero’s friends told cops his pal had confessed to the brutal slaying of McCallum and that “she screamed” during the ordeal, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
She had been about to break up with her jealous boyfriend when he killed her, the sources said.
The friend – who was “extremely shaken up” – walked into the Sixth Precinct station house, where he told detectives that Cordero had spilled the beans to him Monday night.
It was a day after McCallum’s rotting corpse was found wrapped in a sheet on the floor of her locked bedroom at 4 Washington Square Village.
Cops believe that McCallum, whose divorced parents are prominent NYU professors, was killed Thursday, the day after hosting a raucous party at her eighth-floor apartment to celebrate dad Robert’s wedding.
Cordero had not been invited to the party.
He “confessed to the friend in detail what he did and how he did it,” said one source.
“He told this friend that he went to see her . . . that he killed her, and she screamed,” the source said. “The boyfriend is definitely our guy.”
Friends told The Post Monday that McCallum was last seen Thursday morning. Four pals had slept over in her apartment after the party.
One of those friends said McCallum was supposed to have joined them at the beach later that day but backed out at the last minute to help her father pack for his honeymoon.
Investigators said Cordero was jealous that McCallum had been seeing other men – and suspected she was about to break it off with him for good.
Cordero was also upset that he had not been invited to the party and went to her apartment to confront her, sources said.
One of McCallum’s roommates told police that Cordero was last seen inside the apartment Thursday night washing his hands in the kitchen – about the time cops believe she was murdered.
Her roommates, who said they hadn’t seen McCallum in days, never tried to go into her room – even though the door was locked and the TV was playing.
On Sunday the apartment began to smell and the roommates called the super, who then alerted police.
McCallum’s body was found surrounded by empty condom wrappers and empty 40-ounce malt-liquor bottles, sources said. Her bed was splattered with blood, the sources said.
McCallum had been beaten and strangled, sources said.
Cordero has an arrest record for marijuana possession and trespassing.
His relatives said he dated McCallum for the past 2½ years after meeting her on the Upper West Side, where he had been living and where she attended the selective Beacon School.
“I hope to God he didn’t do this, but I can’t vouch for him, because over the last seven months, he’s been losing it,” said a man who identified himself as Jason, the longtime boyfriend of Cordero’s sister, Diana.
“He’s been depressed, he’s been experimenting with drugs, doing ‘shrooms [psychedelic mushrooms] and stuff like that,” Jason said.
Jason said Cordero and McCallum both loved poetry.
Diana Cordero said she treated McCallum as “part of the family” during the couple’s frequent visits to her Amsterdam Avenue apartment.
Diana also said that her brother and McCallum “would fight” verbally – like many couples – but that it stopped there.
“It would never get physical,” she said.
She also said her brother could “never do anything that extreme” and that he should talk to the police so he “can clear his name.”
She spoke to The Post before her brother’s attempted suicide and alleged confession.
Meanwhile, detectives said they learned that Cordero routinely beat McCallum, who had just finished her sophomore year at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.
“A girlfriend of hers in California” told cops that Cordero “has a history of beating her badly,” one source said.
McCallum’s mom, Teboho Moja, told detectives she knew “her daughter was being beaten by the boyfriend,” the source added.
“She would show up with bruises and cuts, and everyone knew what had happened,” said the source, adding that McCallum had “tried repeatedly . . . to cut things off” with Cordero.
Dominique Simpson, a classmate of McCallum, told The Post the slain woman told her last spring that “she was sick of being manipulated and controlled” by her boyfriend, who moved to California in February to be with her.
“He didn’t like for her to go to places without him knowing about it,” said the stricken Simpson. “It’s just so disgusting to me, the feeling that she must have had . . . her worst dream came true: He killed her.”
McCallum and Cordero often wrote each other, as documented in a series of love letters obtained by The Post.
In one letter, dated April 1, McCallum wrote: “I’m missing you a lot. I cried the whole day that you left.”
In another, from last year, McCallum doodled a series of hearts with a large one inscribed “Mike n’ Tumi” and the words “I love you” written all over the page. Last night, Moja, a higher-education professor at NYU, was en route to New York from South Africa, where she had been a well-known educator before moving to the United States.
McCallum’s dad, an adjunct art-education professor at NYU, lives in Harlem and was on his honeymoon at the time of the murder.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, “There was some damage to the face” of McCallum, whose head was wrapped in a blood-drenched towel.
The Medical Examiner’s Office is still investigating the cause of death.
Additional reporting by Emmett Berg in Oakland, Calif., and Dan Mangan, Samuel Goldsmith, Larry Celona, John Doyle and Douglas Monteroin New York