Boyfriend arrested in ghastly Bronx torture slay after neighbors chase him down in street

Police arrested the 26-year-old Bronx man on Friday who they say tortured and killed his girlfriend — after neighbors chased him down when he brazenly returned to try to get back into his apartment, the Daily News has learned.

Two videos reviewed by The News show a stunned- and winded-looking Robert Strother sitting in the middle of the street one block away from the building, after he had been chased there by locals, as police stand around him and people comment from the sidelines in both Spanish and English on his arrest.

Dressed in a white T-shirt, black sweatpants and white sneakers and sporting a heavy black beard, the hulking Strother at one point shrugs off the hand of a police officer who offers to help him up, then, with labored breathing, slowly gets up out of the street and walks over and sits down by a playground fence.

“He tryin’ to run away! Put the handcuffs on him!” urges a man in one of the videos.

“That’s how they f—ed him up!” one woman says, indignantly, in the other video. “Go to jail forever, motherf—ah!”

Strother was arrested following a weeklong manhunt, cops said. He’s charged with murder, manslaughter, hindering prosecution, concealment of a human corpse and tampering with physical evidence.

He was apprehended by cops after community members spotted him and called 911, cops said. Neighbors confronted Strother around 1 p.m. Friday when he attempted to enter the building where the brutal murder took place.

A witness told The News that a “crazy fight” ensued and Strother fled for his life.

Strother is accused of torturing his live-in girlfriend, Princesa Encarnacion-Soto, 21, for more than a week before she died inside the Grand Concourse apartment in Fordham he shared with his mother on July 22.

A memorial for Encarnacion-Soto was set up outside the building Saturday, featuring a poster with smiling photos of her and the words, “Rest in heaven. Until we meet again. Clock it”

Strother’s mother, Naida Jorge, 54, is facing murder charges for “rendering criminal assistance.” She’s also accused of cleaning up the crime scene.

Encarnacion-Soto’s body was riddled with bruises from hammer strikes, deep cuts and stab wounds, and even had the bottoms of her feet cut open, prosecutors said on July 25 as a judge ordered Jorge to be held without bail.

Soto was so badly brutalized that “a piece of a knuckle on her finger” was missing when the city’s Medical Examiner performed an autopsy, which detectives said took at least two days to complete as they painstakingly catalogued each injury, according to court papers.

Jorge told police that she found the body on the stairs outside the apartment. She had a neighbor call police and claimed at first she didn’t know who Soto was.

But then she allowed cops to check her apartment, where they found a modern-day torture chamber that Jorge had unsuccessfully tried to clean up. Cops found bloody clothes, sheets and bungee cords that NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said were used to tie Soto down as she was tortured.

“We believe that she was tied down to the bed, based on the blood that was on the bed,” Kenny said at a briefing at Police Headquarters after the gruesome murder. “The wounds themselves were inflicted for pain, not to kill.”

Jorge became combative and tried to get police to leave the apartment, but she was taken into custody.

“There was a smell of fresh bleach in the area. The apartment was not the tidiest, but in only certain spots was the bleach used to clean,” Kenny said.

Since her arrest, the mother has either refused to talk or denied all the allegations, a police source with knowledge of the case said.

Police said Jorge was seen dropping off a black garbage bag near the building’s boiler room after the victim was discovered. Inside the bag were bloody clothes and cleaning supplies, a building worker who saw the contents told the Daily News.

“She did attempt to clean up the crime scene,” Kenny said of Jorge. “There was no blood on [the victim]. There was no blood on her as she lay on the staircase, and she was in fresh clothing that had no blood on it. So it’s a possibility that someone cleaned the body, put fresh clothes on her and threw her down a flight of stairs.”

Encarnacion-Soto and Strother had been together for nearly three years. Then they broke up and she went to Rhode Island, where her parents live, before returning to the Bronx on July 11, and moving back in with the mother and son.

Police had said there was no reported history of domestic violence between the victim and her 26-year-old boyfriend, but officials said the bruises showed otherwise. Kenny also said the boyfriend had 22 domestic violence incidents reported against him, but none involving the victim.

Strother’s arraignment at Bronx Criminal Court was pending Saturday afternoon.

“My daughter was beautiful. Beautiful,” the victim’s inconsolable mother, Jocibelle Soto, 39, previously told The News from her home in Rhode Island. “She was a good person, a good daughter, a good sister and a good friend.

“She was not supposed to die like that,” she said through tears.

“I want everybody who did this to my daughter to go to jail. My daughter is in God’s hands, but I can’t sleep until they are in jail.”

Originally Published: July 26, 2025 at 2:53 PM EDT