The estranged husband of Jeanine Cammarata, the Staten Island teacher whose badly charred body police found in a storage unit last week, has been formally accused of killing her. Along with his girlfriend, Kangi-Ayisha Egea, Michael Cammarata faces charges of second-degree murder, concealment of a corpse, and tampering with evidence. They were arraigned Friday, after the medical examiner identified Jeanine's body using dental records.
Jeanine, 37, had been missing for about a week before police, operating on information from Egea, found her remains. When they showed up at Extra Space Storage in Arden Heights, Staten Island, investigators found a burned body shoved into a trash bag and surrounded by air fresheners, an apparent effort to mask the stench. Michael had been captured on security footage twice—once leaving his apartment, with a big bag in hand, and later on, at Extra Space—on March 30th, the last day Jeanine was seen alive. Police arrested him on separate assault charges on Wednesday, and while he admitted to seeing Jeanine the previous Saturday, to having sex with her and to hitting her, he did not admit to her murder.
Jeanine's boyfriend notified the NYPD of her disappearance last Tuesday, after she missed a custody hearing on Monday and failed to show up for work. (Jeanine taught at Staten Island's P.S. 29 and also had a part-time job at Dollar Tree.) Meanwhile, her long-time friend, Jessica Pobega, had been getting cryptic messages from Jeanine's Facebook account, insisting that "everything [was] fine" and that she was with her kids, but Jeanine was unreachable by phone, heightening her suspicions.
Jeanine had reportedly served Michael with divorce papers days before she went missing. Their marriage, friends told the Daily News, had been unravelling for a long time, and Jeanine had been trying to win sole custody of her children and get away from Michael. Which, according to Pobega, is how Egea wound up in the picture: The couple initially hired her as a babysitter, but Jeanine thought a new relationship might shift some of Michael's hostile attention off of her.
"Jeanine actually set up Mike and Ayisha because she wanted Mike to be occupied and leave her alone," Pobega told the Daily News. "She actually introduced them in the hopes that Mike would stop stalking her."
When Egea had moved into the Cammaratas' apartment in Rockaway, Jeanine decided she had to leave. Her coworker and eventual landlord, Jose Perez, told her about an open apartment in his building and she jumped on it. "She was trying to get rid of Mike," Perez explained to the Daily News, adding that the move didn't keep him away. Shortly before she died, she updated her will to provide for her children. (She had one child from a previous marriage, and two children with Michael: a 3-year-old boy and a 7-year-old girl.) "She knew something was up," Perez said. "She wanted her sister to keep the kids and she wanted to make sure her kids got everything."
Police have yet to determine whether or not Michael and Egea may have had the couple's children in the car with them when they drove from Michael's Rockaway home to Staten Island, where they dumped Jeanine's body. The pair are currently being held without bail.
