Search continues for answers about woman killed near Capitol

But there were few clues about Miriam Carey’s behavior at her mother’s home. Many people in the neighborhood said that the elder Carey, like many others in the project, which has seen its share of crime in recent years, kept to herself. They mentioned seeing Miriam and her two sisters visiting at times, but most neighbors were tight-lipped about the family.

“I’ve known her a long time,” James Rainey said of Idella. Rainey, who has lived in a building across the courtyard for 47 years, said when he last spoke to Idella Carey a week ago, nothing seemed abnormal, and she hadn’t mentioned her daughter.

Many of the younger women in the project expressed their sympathies for Miriam Carey as they pushed baby carriages across the bumpy concrete paths that lead through the project, tsk-ing at the growing crowd of reporters and camera crews.

Police, the FBI and other law enforcement searched Thursday night at Miriam Carey’s ground-floor apartment building in Stamford, Conn. By Friday morning, the apartment, in a sprawling beige building surrounding a common grassy area with a gazebo in the middle, was quiet again.

A maintenance worker who did not want to give his name said he knew Carey by sight and had seen her and her baby many times, usually about 8 a.m. when she would leave for work.

“The lady seemed OK,” he said. Few other neighbors shed any light on Carey. “It’s very private around here,” one neighbor said.

News trucks still hovered around the apartment of Carey’s sister Valarie, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where children rode bicycles and scooters up and down the street staring at the news crews.

Valarie Carey’s neighbors told the New York Daily News that Miriam frequently visited her sister wearing hospital scrubs, sometimes with a man in a Porsche Cayenne SUV. The neighbor said Miriam Carey had a breakdown when visiting her sister three months ago.

Miriam’s other sister, Amy Carey-Jones, lives in an apartment building on a street of brownstones in a rapidly gentrifying area of Brooklyn on the border of the Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy neighborhoods. The street is diverse, with white, tattooed young professionals walking dogs and African American families sitting on stoops; fancy bicycles and tomato plants adorn some of the balconies.

Amy and Valarie appeared on CNN to talk about their sister; as part of their contract with anchor Anderson Cooper, they have decided not to talk to other media. In the interview they seemed unsure of what had happened.

“We’re still trying to put the pieces together. It’s very sudden,” Amy Carey-Jones said. “It still doesn’t seem real. And we’re just waiting for the real story as to exactly what happened to come out.”