Sources say Raul Barrera didn't want his girlfriend to be beautiful for anyone else.
Sarah Coit's body was found in a blood soaked Lower East Side apartment Sunday morning after, police said, she was murdered by a rage-fueled Barrera.
Raul Barrera pulled several knives from a wooden butcher block early Sunday, cops said. Then, in a fit of rage, he used them to gouge Coit's pretty face. He sliced her across the mouth and jaw, and with such force that one of the tips of the blades broke, authorities said.
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 worked in public relations, was held without bail and placed on suicide watch.
Coleman Entertainment Group President, B.J. Coleman, said he saw his former freelancer last week.
"He wasn't a monster," Coleman told the News. "He was ambitious. This is not someone who goes around hacking people."
But a former neighbor told the New York Post that Barrera was indeed a "monster."
"I knew he was going to kill her," said Colleen Carerir. "His eyes were insane. He was a killer. He looked at me like I was a piece of meat."
Carerir had a sinking feeling that Barrera would end up killing Coit, a talented artist from Greenwich, Conn., who neighbors heard begging for her life on Sunday.
But even before then, on East 33rd, "I heard her violent screams," said Carerir. In January, Carerir called cops one night "when I thought he was killing her."
Police responded, but they didn't arrest Barrera, Carerir said.