To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

The bodies of Helen Buchel and Brittany Passalacqua, 12, were first discovered by Buchel's teenage son in the families North Main Street apartment Friday afternoon.

For friends and neighbors, the reality of Buchel and Passalacqua's deaths is still sinking in.

"I'm still shaken over it. I don't know how to put it. I just don't believe it, you know, why? So close, I'm only three houses up from the home that it happened and it’s pretty close," neighbor Elizabeth Powers said.

Police arrested Buchel's boyfriend, John Brown, 35, of Palmyra, and charged him with intentionally murdering Bouchel with a knife, and also killing Brittany.

Neighbors who live in the same apartment house as Buchel say Brown had only been coming around for the past few months.
Police said Brown was on parole, convicted of assaulting an infant in 2003.

"I saw him a couple of times in the driveway and stuff and we never spoke. I saw him, it's weird," Carrie Barnes said. Barnes described Brittany as a "regular little girl."

"I didn't know her that well, but she seemed like she did her thing, you know. She did gymnastics. I would see them out front and she always had her dog. It’s a shame that it happened," said Barnes.
Brittany was a seventh-grader at Geneva Middle School.

Close friends who did not want to be identified said Brittany was, "a good student, a quiet girl, who loved cheerleading."

Buchel's son is with his father. No word yet on funeral arrangements.

Brown is scheduled to be back in Geneva City Court Monday.

Geneva Police Department