Unlike Elin Krantz, the American Sarah Coit was living with the beast who slew her. The story follows.
Sarah Coit, woman slashed to death in her New York apartment, mourned by friends in Connecticut
BY Alison Gendar, Edgar Sandoval and Corky Siemaszko
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Tuesday, April 12th 2011, 2:04 PM
Right: Raul Barrera faces 2nd-degree murder charges.
The former coach of brutally murdered Connecticut beauty Sarah Coit said Tuesday his team is in mourning - even though most of the runners have never met her.
"We are like a family at the cross country track team," shaken Greenwich High School coach Bill Mongovan.
"We had a moment of silence for her yesterday. We remembered her. Even those students who never met her. We are all part of the same team."
Coit, 23, who was stabbed to death Sunday in her Manhattan apartment, ran cross country and was "very well liked," said Mongovan, who has coached at the school since 1989.
"She seemed to really enjoy being part of the team," he said.
Mongovan said he was horrified by reports that Coit's killer deliberately tried to destroy her face - and nearly decapitated her in his fury.
"Just the circumstances, her passing," he said, his voice trailing off.
Coit's live in boyfriend, Raul Barrera, was charged Monday with second-degree murder. The 33-year-old PR man claims Coit came at him first.
Sources said the hotheaded suspect lost it when he Coit said they were through - and slew her after sadistically slicing her face apart with knives from a wooden butcher block.
"It was pure anger," one of the sources told The Daily News. "He didn't want her to leave, and he didn't want her to be beautiful for anyone else."
The blow that killed the 23-year-old blond was a stab to the left side of her back, an autopsy revealed. It left "a gaping stab wound to the left side of the torso from which internal organs were protruding," court records show.
Barrera, who was arrested last year on unrelated assault charges, fled the blood-spattered lower East Side apartment after the murder, police said.
Prosecutors revealed that Barrera was racing to Penn Station to make a getaway when he called his dad for advice. He told Barrera to "to turn himself in," Assistant District Attorney William Beesch said.
A former Hunter College student who worked in sales at Lacoste, Coit grew up in Riverside, Conn., the tony town near Greenwich. She was the only daughter of Lynde Coit, a prominent financial adviser, and his wife, Anne Taylor, a neighbor said.
Barrera freelanced for companies such as Coleman Entertainment Group. Company President B.J. Coleman said he saw him last Thursday and described him as a "cool, chill guy" who had a young son from a prior relationship.
"He wasn't a monster," Coleman said. "He was ambitious. This is not someone who goes around hacking people."
by Alison Gendar
