Personal Assistant Is Charged in Broker’s Killing

A personal assistant was charged yesterday with using a piece of exercise equipment to fatally bludgeon her boss, Linda Stein, the former punk-rock manager turned real estate broker, in her Fifth Avenue penthouse, the authorities said.

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Linda Stein in April. She was found bludgeoned on Oct. 30.

The assistant, Natavia S. Lowery, 26, of Brooklyn, said she was driven to violence by the victim herself, who, she said, treated her poorly, "just kept yelling at her" and even made her ill by blowing marijuana smoke in her face, officials said.

Finally, Ms. Lowery told detectives, she bashed Ms. Stein six or seven times in the back of the head on Oct. 30 with what she called a yoga stick after Ms. Stein, 62, made a racially demeaning remark, other law enforcement officials said.

"Lowery, who had been Stein's personal assistant for approximately four months, claimed that Stein had been verbally abusive to her," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference yesterday at 1 Police Plaza.

Several friends of Ms. Stein, who have described her as a larger-than-life, sometimes volatile character, said they did not know Ms. Lowery. Ms. Lowery's aunt, Julia Carrow Lowery, said her niece had enjoyed working for Ms. Stein, and declared her incapable of killing anyone.

Police detectives interviewed Ms. Lowery on Oct. 31, and again on Thursday before making the arrest. Officials in the Manhattan district attorney's office charged her with second-degree murder. Yesterday, after she was held overnight at the Seventh Precinct station house on the Lower East Side, two detectives took her, handcuffed, head down and silent, to be arraigned.

At the arraignment last night, Ms. Lowery's lawyer, Gilbert Parris, said that he was not present when she was questioned, "clearly a breach of my representation of her." Outside the courtroom, he said he would challenge the admissibility of her statement.

Officials said they believed that Ms. Stein - who helped pioneer the punk music scene by managing the Ramones and went on to help celebrities buy and sell their homes - had tempestuous dealings with Ms. Lowery that escalated from animosity to violence.

"It was that Linda just kept yelling at her, over everything," one law enforcement official said. "They fought. It was like a continuous thing, like a buildup."

The final episode exploded in Ms. Stein's 18th-floor apartment at 965 Fifth Avenue. The law enforcement officials - in recounting Ms. Lowery's account, which was videotaped - said that Ms. Lowery was retrieving her boss's e-mail messages when Ms. Stein approached her and blew smoke in her face. (A family lawyer said that Ms. Stein occasionally smoked marijuana to ease the pain from recurring bouts of cancer.)

Then lunchtime approached. Ms. Lowery said that when Ms. Stein offered to get her something to eat, she declined, explaining that she had savings in the bank and could get her own lunch with her own money, officials said.

Then, according to Ms. Lowery, Ms. Stein said to her that she was apparently one of the few black people who could save money.

Ms. Stein "used profanity and derogatory language and waved the yoga stick at her," Mr. Kelly said, summarizing Ms. Lowery's admission. "Lowery said she grabbed the yoga stick from Stein's hands and struck her with it."

Ms. Lowery told the detectives that she used the pole-like stick (which another official said might be a Pilates stick) to hit Ms. Stein in the back of the head and neck, officials said. At five feet three inches, according to her driver's license, Ms. Lowery would have been only slightly taller than the five-foot Ms. Stein.

The killing took place between 12:15 and 1 p.m., the police said. Then, carrying a bag, Ms. Lowery left, locked the door behind her, and was caught on surveillance tape, officials said.

Detectives said that some people they interviewed after the killing said they had tried to call Ms. Stein on her cellphone but got her assistant, who said she was not available. Mr. Kelly said that Ms. Lowery left the apartment shortly after 1 p.m.

At Ms. Lowery's arraignment last night, an assistant district attorney, Shanda Strain, said that after the killing, Ms. Lowery used Ms. Stein's A.T.M. card to withdraw 0.

Ms. Stein's body was found on her living room floor shortly before 10:30 p.m. by her daughter Mandy, who called 911. Ms. Stein was pronounced dead at the scene.

The police have not found the murder weapon, Mr. Kelly said.

Reporting was contributed by Ann Farmer, Kate Hammer, Colin Moynihan and Carolyn Wilder.