NY police try to contact relatives of dead woman

NEW YORK police are attempting to contact the relatives of a Cork-born homeless woman who was found dead outside a Catholic Church in Manhattan’s East Village.

Grace Farrell, 35, emigrated from Ireland as a 17-year-old aspiring artist but had fallen on hard times due to alcoholism and an allegedly abusive marriage.

Ms Farrell was discovered by a homeless friend at 8am on Sunday morning having spent the night on a bed of cardboard outside St Brigid’s Church on Avenue B near Seventh Street.

According to the New York Daily News, the deceased woman had previously befriended the man who discovered her.

The man, named by the paper as ‘Tony’, met her in Tompkins Square Park, an area near St Brigid’s, and bought hot dogs for her on Saturday night, just hours before she passed away.

“I tried to shake her, but I couldn’t get her woke,” Tony told the newspaper.

He added that she stood out for her Irish accent, long strawberry-blonde hair and her “beautiful heart”.

An ex-boyfriend, who goes by the name ‘English’, said Ms Farrell was originally from Co Cork and arrived in New York 18 years ago to attend art school. She had a talent for sketching portraits and painting landscapes, he said. “Every time I would make her smile, her eyes would change colour, blue to green.”

She was once married and was estranged from a son who is now nine years old. She told friends her mother lived in a house in the Bronx.

A spokesperson for the Bronx-based Aisling Irish Community immigration centre said it was not aware of either Ms Farrell or her mother when contacted last night.

St Brigid’s, which now mainly caters for local Hispanic parishioners, was built during the famine by Irish emigrants and had been recently restored after an anonymous $20 million (€14.6m) donation.

Results of an autopsy on Ms Farrell have yet to be released.