On the eve of her birthday, a Sunday, Ms. Saavedra gathered with her sisters and their children at the apartment of her older sister, Maitec Saavedra, which was filled with the chirping of pet birds. There was a cake and a fruit tart. Nadia Saavedra posted photos from the party online the next day, at 7:13 a.m.  “Take the time to remember that it’s only one more year that God allowed me to be beside my family is the best thing that could have happened to me, thanks sisters,” she wrote in Spanish.  Mr. Uribe, 38, was, by contrast, nearly silent at family gatherings, shutting himself in his room and acting as if no one else was there. A stocky, square-jawed man, he posted photos online of cases of Modelo beer stacked six feet high, and saved his displays of emotion for the makeshift bars where he met friends.  The couple had gotten married in their hometown, San Pedro Aytec in Huamuxtitlán, Guerrero, about 100 miles from Acapulco, in the heart of a region plagued by violence from cartels vying for control of the drug trade. Ms. Saavedra, 15 at the time, wore a long white dress. Mr. Uribe, whose mother owned a deli, wore a button-down shirt and jeans. They were joined by about 50 guests, who ate and danced at Mr. Uribe’s family home.  “They did seem like they were very much in love,” said Magali Garcia, a neighbor there who attended the wedding and now lives in Florida.  The couple moved to the South Bronx soon after, joining other Mexican immigrants settling in New York City neighborhoods that, since the 1960s, had been predominantly Puerto Rican, Dominican and African-American. About 12,000 people of Mexican descent now live within the confines of the 40th Precinct, accounting for 13 percent of the population.  Mr. Uribe played on an amateur soccer team called Guerrero, after his home state. A friend, Victor Soto, 55, recalled a weekend pickup game this year, where friends and family barbecued shish kebabs with jalapeños, sipped beers and played — Mr. Uribe, with his shirt off.  “I said, ‘It’s only 57 degrees, you’re going to get sick,’” Mr. Soto said. “We were goofing; he wouldn’t even wait for the summer.”  At other times, Mr. Uribe’s manner was erratic and cold.  “He have days when he’s all right, he knows you,” Mr. Soto said. “The next day, he don’t know you; there were days that he wouldn’t register. Some days I say, ‘Hi,’ he keep walking. Later in the day he say, ‘Sorry I was thinking about something, I had something on my mind.’ ”  Ms. Saavedra worked housecleaning jobs to support the family while she cooked for Uri and Naiyela and helped them with their schoolwork. Mr. Uribe preferred getting drunk while bantering about sports with other men, Maitec Saavedra said. In the quieter setting of home, with his wife and children, he grew anxious and lashed out.  “He would get aggressive when she would go home,” Maitec Saavedra said, “because he knew that if he tried to say anything like that in front of them, they would not allow him to behave that way.”  She added, “He didn’t really pay attention to his kids — he didn’t really take care of them, Nadia and the kids.”  Mr. Uribe worked for a time as a laborer around the city. He immersed himself in different brands of machinery and was skilled at fixing engines, so much so that clients would sometimes send cars to pick him up, Mr. Soto said.  But he had stopped working in the early winter, creating more friction in the marriage, Maitec Saavedra said.  Relatives prodded Ms. Saavedra about why she was still with him; she said it was for the children. As in many cases of domestic violence, the couple mostly hid their discord.  A neighbor who lives in Ms. Saavedra’s apartment building in the Bronx said she had heard screaming coming from the apartment on previous occasions. Others said Mr. Uribe was physically abusive. Ms. Saavedra confided to a few friends at a local nonprofit that her husband beat and humiliated her, the group’s founder, Elva Guevara, said.  Mr. Mendoza, Ms. Saavedra’s nephew, said the couple’s problems grew as Mr. Uribe become more emotionally unstable. “He is upset with everybody, with everybody — with no reason,” Mr. Mendoza said.  To understand how murder lives on in a city that has seen crime fall to historic lows, The New York Times is examining the life and death of each person murdered this year in the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx.  Sign up to receive an email when we publish the next stories in this series.  Near the end of his life, Mr. Uribe became enraged about a relationship that Ms. Saavedra was having with another man, who described the relationship to detectives.  The police said they had not learned of any problems between Ms. Saavedra and Mr. Uribe until Jan. 28, when she called 911 to say he had threatened to kill himself during an argument and had slashed his left forearm.  By the time officers arrived, Mr. Uribe was gone; the officers, concerned about his state of mind, filled out a missing persons report for him. The police had no indication at that point that Mr. Uribe had been violent toward Ms. Saavedra. They wrote a domestic incident report for harassment and an argument.  The next day, around 3 p.m., Ms. Saavedra called the police again. Mr. Uribe was trying to get inside her apartment. Officers arrived and took him to the hospital. He had wrapped his cuts in duct tape, and told the officers that each one represented a year of their relationship.  Ms. Saavedra went to Family Court that day, seeking an order of protection because Mr. Uribe had cut himself during an argument. She was granted a temporary order that would expire on March 9.  Ms. Saavedra alluded to her ordeal on Facebook. “Nobody said it would be easy,” she wrote on Feb. 28. “But with my faith, and this peace that God has given me, I know that better things are coming!!!”  By the morning of March 7, the order had not been served. It indicated Ms. Saavedra needed to “arrange” to have it served by contacting the authorities, but police records show that she never did — a reflection of the onus placed on victims to secure their own protection, say counselors who work with domestic violence victims.  The pattern of a deepening desperation — Mr. Uribe’s threats to kill himself, his paranoia about a boyfriend — were familiar milestones on the path to domestic homicide.  Domestic homicides — killings that happen within a family or romantic relationship — fell from 76 in 2002 to 63 in 2014 in the city, according to the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence. The decrease was helped in part by an expansion of government options for victims seeking to escape violence. But domestic homicides are much more stubborn than overall murders, which plunged at more than double the rate during the same period. Two-thirds of adult domestic homicide victims from 2002 to 2013 were women, city data show.  “The attitudes that drive domestic violence are deeply embedded in our culture, and are very persistent,” said Liz Roberts, chief program officer at Safe Horizon, a victim services group.  There were 10 intimate-partner homicides in the Bronx last year, the highest for any borough; two were in the 40th Precinct. The borough recorded 75,299 domestic incident reports last year, a rate of 544 per 10,000 residents, compared to 347 per 10,000 residents in Brooklyn, the borough with the second-highest rate.  In the 40th Precinct, domestic-related major crimes, many of them felony assaults, jumped to 84 so far this year from 58 during the same period in 2015 — an increase that Capt. Thomas Alps called “very problematic” at the recent public safety meeting.  People without jobs are more likely to abuse their partners, counselors say, in part because they lose their stake in following social norms. Around 40 percent of domestic homicide victims in New York City from 2004 to 2013 lived in communities with high poverty, compared to about a quarter of the city’s population over all.  Counselors for victims say immigrants are often especially reluctant to seek help — because of their immigration status or an inability to speak English or because domestic-violence standards may have been looser in their home countries.
After years of violence, Nadia Saavedra finally told her husband to leave their Bronx home. Soon after, the police say, he returned to kill her and then himself.