BY WIL CRUZ, EDGAR SANDOVAL AND BILL HUTCHINSON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Murray/News
Suspect Amahal Lynch is escorted by cops.
Taggart for News
Facebook photo of Shakeema Elliott and daughter Kaliya Williams, who were found dead in bathtub.
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A Brooklyn man confessed Monday night to strangling an 8-year-old girl and her mother and then setting up the crime scene to look like a murder-suicide, cops said.
Amahal Lynch, 20, was hit with double-murder charges after autopsies revealed foul play and he admitted his role in the deaths of Shakeema Elliott, 29, and Kaliya Williams.
"He made it look like a suicide," said a police source, citing Lynch's videotaped confession that he strangled Elliott during an argument before killing her daughter.
Lynch, a city housing employee who once had a romantic relationship with Elliott, told prosecutors he put the bodies in the bathtub and then scattered pills on the bathroom floor.
"I just don't understand, why kill both? If you want to hurt Shakeema, why do the little girl, too? She was a baby," said Elliott's distraught cousin, Madeline Motley, 57, of North Babylon, L.I.
Their naked bodies were found Sunday morning in their Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, apartment by cops responding to a burglary complaint.
When officers arrived at the Batchelder St. address in the Nostrand Houses, they found the front door ajar, a police source said.
Detectives found no obvious signs of trauma on either victim, the source said.
But late yesterday the city medical examiner said Elliott and Kaliya died from "asphyxia due to neck compressions."
Even before autopsy results were announced, cops picked up Lynch for questioning.
The news of the double-murder arrest left heartbroken relatives and neighbors outraged that someone would kill the doting single mother and her innocent daughter, who was nicknamed Le Le.
"It's just a total shock," said Kaliya's godmother, Wanda Sunpce, 25, of Brooklyn.
Sunpce said she never believed Elliott would purposely harm herself and her little girl.
"I just saw her a month ago. She seemed fine," Sunpce said of Elliott. "She did not bother anyone. She did not talk of anyone bothering her. All she did was love her daughter."
Sunpce said Elliott, who was unemployed, had a rough upbringing, but persevered to become a good mother. Her birth mother gave her up for adoption when she was 5 and her adoptive mother died last year of stomach complications. Her adoptive father died several years ago after suffering a stroke, Sunpce said.
Elliott kept in contact with her birth mother, Sharon Elliott of South Carolina, who was headed to New York last night, Sunpce said.
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