Shaniesha Forbes, 14, (pictured above) was killed by her 20 year old boyfriend who then burnt her body and dumped her remains on a beach just because he thought she was pregnant. The family of the 14-year-old Brooklyn girl who was allegedly killed by her boyfriend and dumped on a beach blasted him yesterday morning for cowardly slaying her after he thought she was pregnant.
Police had arrested Christian Ferdinand, 20, in Maine on Tuesday, where he had fled after he allegedly suffocated Shaniesha Forbes, 14, and burnt her body before dumping the remains at Gerritsen Beach.
“On the record, she wasn’t pregnant at all. As a 20-year-old man, that is something you could easily find out,” said her devastated cousin Kerry-Anne Thomas. “You had the courage and the balls to kill her and bring her body, and lay her on the beach. But you couldn’t go to the pharmacy to buy a pregnancy test to find out if it was actually true.”
Detectives yesterday drove Ferdinand back to the 63rd Precinct station house in Brooklyn, where he allegedly admitted to killing Forbes in January after coming to believe she was pregnant.
He was charged with second-degree murder, and has not been arraigned yet.
The victim’s weeping mother Sandra Price thanked the police for catching the killer, as did her grandmother Daisy Smith.
“I’m very grateful for the job that the two main detectives have done,” she said. “They did a wonderful job catching the killer and getting him for the street, and hopefully putting him away for life. That’s what I think he deserves.”
Smith said the family hadn’t been eating or sleeping since the girl’s death. “I’m so happy they caught this guy who killed my granddaughter,” she said. “There was nothing we could do, only wait…Bring him justice.”
Sources said Ferdinand suffocated the aspiring nurse — who was, in fact, not pregnant — in his apartment. He then kept her body in his home for a couple of days, sources said.
Finally, he allegedly put the corpse into a suitcase and brought it onto the beach, where he tried to get rid of it by setting it on fire.
Cops recovered the suitcase the killer used to transport Forbes’ body from his Maine hideout and also took floorboards from his former Brooklyn apartment, the sources said.
Relatives said never met Ferdinand, and was not sure how he met Forbes. Thomas speculated that they may have met through social media.
Honestly there shouldn’t have been a relationship. He was a 20-year-old man and she was a 14-year-old child,” she said. “As an adult, which he is, he should have known it was inappropriate to have any type of a relationship with a 14-year-old.”
Forbes was a student at the Academy of Young Writers in East New York.