Two Women Stabbed Hours Apart on Long Island, Police Probe Possible Link

The first body was hidden in plain sight inside a Valley Stream apartment at 90 West Mineola Avenue, and police did not realize the woman had been killed until they were already rushing to a second stabbing scene in Island Park. That sequencing is what makes this case so unsettling: detectives were forced to work backward, stitching together two apparently separate emergencies before they could test whether they were looking at one homicide spree or a grim coincidence.

Nassau County police later identified the suspect as 22-year-old Rony Yahir Alvarenga Rivera of Valley Stream. He turned himself in at a 7-Eleven in Lynbrook after the killings, and police charged him with first-degree and second-degree murder. Authorities said the first victim was his 32-year-old roommate, and the second was his 42-year-old coworker at Wendy’s, which immediately tightened the focus of the investigation. This no longer looked like two random attacks. It looked like a suspect who moved between people already connected to him, across different parts of Nassau County.

Police said the first killing likely happened around 9 p.m. Thursday, April 30, 2026. The Wendy’s stabbing was reported about 12:27 a.m. Friday, May 1, 2026, meaning the deaths were separated by roughly three hours. In true-crime terms, that timing matters more than the headlines often suggest. Detectives have to anchor the timeline to the minute, then compare victimology, geography, and opportunity. Was Rivera acting on a single impulse, a dispute that escalated, or two separate acts linked by a shared suspect and a narrow window of time? That is the kind of question that determines whether investigators start treating a case as an isolated double homicide or something more patterned.

The second victim was stabbed outside the Wendy’s on Austin Boulevard in Island Park while taking out the garbage. Later reporting identified her as Ana Maria del Aguila-Cordova, 42, a mother of two from Long Beach. The contrast between the two scenes is hard to miss. One was a private apartment in Valley Stream. The other was a public-facing fast-food restaurant, struck during an ordinary work task in the middle of the night shift. That spread across Valley Stream, Island Park, and Lynbrook is exactly why police often hesitate before calling a link confirmed, even when the violence feels connected from the start.

A Nassau County officer said Rivera allegedly told police, in substance, that he had killed somebody before his arrest. By then, the shape of the case was already changing fast. The first victim was found only after officers were alerted to the Wendy’s stabbing, and the medical examiner arrived at the Valley Stream scene Friday afternoon. For investigators, the first 24 hours were about more than arrests. They were about proving how the two killings fit together, and whether the evidence showed a broken chain of violence or a single suspect cutting a path through Nassau County in one night.