Missing teacher Jeanine Cammarata: Body found in storage facility
Human remains "burned beyond recognition" found at a Staten Island storage facility Thursday morning are believed to be those of missing teacher Jeanine Cammarata.
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Arden Heights, Staten Island (WPIX) — Human remains “burned beyond recognition” found at a Staten Island storage facility Thursday morning are believed to be those of missing teacher Jeanine Cammarata, a law enforcement source told PIX11 News.
The 37-year-old mother of three was last seen Saturday night at her boyfriend’s home.
Her estranged husband, Michael Cammarata, 42, has since been taken into police custody on charges of assault and stalking. The source said surveillance footage tied Michael Cammarata to that storage facility.
At this point, the charges against the husband are not directly related to her disappearance, police said.
For several days, the people closest to the school teacher were worried about a bad outcome.
Jeanine Cammarata failed to show up Monday at either of her two jobs: as a first-grade teacher and as a Dollar Tree cashier. She also missed a divorce and custody hearing Monday that she had requested.
“My greatest fear is I will not be speaking to Jeanine again,” Eric Gansberg, her attorney, said Wednesday. “And I fear the worst.”
“She was terrified of him,” Gansberg told PIX11 News.
When Jeanine Cammarata hired Gansberg late last year, she told him that she left her marital residence in mid-2017 “due to domestic violence.”
There was no legal custody arrangement between Cammarata and her estranged husband, and she was content with having her children live with him in the family home in Queens, Gansberg said.
Jeanine Cammarata had moved to the New Brighton neighborhood of Staten Island and had been working since October as a teacher at P.S. 29, about three miles from her home.
But Jose Perez, a former co-worker who has known her for years, told WABC that the woman had become unhappy in recent weeks about not being able to see her kids when she wanted to.
“She wasn’t able to see her kids, and that’s when she said, ‘OK, I had enough. I’m gonna go get a lawyer, I’m gonna get divorced, and I’m gonna get custody of my kids,’ ” said Perez. “And now she’s gone.”
Her best friend, Jessica Pogeba, had received texts over the past few days from Jeanine Cammarata’s phone. Those texts assured that Jeanine was not in trouble — “I am with Mike and the children,” one of them said.
But when Cammarata ignored requests that they talk by phone, Pogeba sent a text questioning whether the communications actually came from her friend.
“It’s me,” read the responding text from the woman’s phone.
The-CNN-Wire 
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