The aunt of a New York model who was murdered in Jamaica two months ago told reporters she received two phone calls on Sunday, from her niece’s phone.
When Brunner answered, there was silence on the other end of the line.
“I got goosebumps from my head to my toes,” Brunner told the Daily News, as her hopes spiked for a break in the unsolved case, growing colder by the day.
The murdered Queens woman’s cell phone was never recovered and police have few leads.
Six hours later, Brunner received another call from the same number, but she didn’t manage to answer on time. When she called back, she got the same automated “number not in service” message she usually gets when trying the number.
The unexplained calls are a stark reminder of the frustrating standstill of the investigation into Gibbon’s murder.
The mother of the 26-year-old said that she left her Hollis, Queens, home in October and was staying at the family’s resort in Montego Bay. She wanted to make a documentary, CBS noted.
“My belief is it was a cold, calculated, planned out murder,” mom Andrea Cali-Gibbon was quoted by CBS as saying. “It wasn’t a random act of violence. It is somebody she knew, somebody she trusted, and somebody who betrayed her.”
“We were very close, so you can imagine, when I got the news, ‘devastated’ doesn’t begin to describe it,” she added to the Daily News. She called her daughter a world traveler who taught English to children in Brazil at one point.
“She wanted to travel to countries and try things and experience cultures,” the mother said, adding that her father is Jamaican.
The slain woman’s mother said that police did not take much of an interest in surveillance video that emerged of Gibbon leaving the hotel–the last images of her alive.
“They didn’t think it was going to help solve the crime,” Cali-Gibbon said. “They’re only focused on the phone.”
Meanwhile, the investigation continues.
