Man pleads guilty to manslaughter for strangling NYU teachers’ daughter in 2007

Man pleads guilty in 2007 NYU apartment killing

NEW YORK — A sometime boyfriend pleaded guilty Wednesday to strangling a college student in her professor mother’s New York University apartment, a slaying authorities said spurred the killer to try to take his own life.

Michael Cordero sighed, his voice halting and cracking at times, as he apologized in a Manhattan court for killing Boitumelo McCallum in 2007. She was a student at a California college and the daughter of two New York University teachers.

“If I could take it back, I would,” said Cordero, 25, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a promised 25-year sentence.

“I know what I did, and I’m willing to pay for it,” he said. His sentencing was set for April 28.

McCallum, 20, was the daughter of NYU art teacher Robert McCallum and Teboho Moja, an education professor and South African activist; their daughter was born in South Africa and lived there until her early teens.

She was in New York on a break from her studies at Oakland, Calif.-based Mills College when Cordero killed her after what Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Martha Bashford called “a petty argument” in her mother’s faculty apartment. Cordero and McCallum had recently resumed an on-again, off-again relationship, Bashford said.

Moja was overseas at the time of the slaying, and McCallum’s body went undiscovered for two to three days before her remains were found Aug. 5, 2007, wrapped in a sheet in a locked bedroom.

Cordero slit his wrists on a Manhattan rooftop as detectives looked to question him in the days after the slaying, police said. He later told investigators he had tried to commit suicide because he had killed her, according to court documents.

“She didn’t deserve this,” he said, according to the documents.

McCallum’s and Cordero’s relatives declined to comment as they left court.