She mainly worked in a lab inside the commission's Totowa water-treatment plant, but her job often took her down to a pair of frigid tunnels in the basement, where she calibrated water-monitoring equipment and collected water specimens from hoses along the wall for testing.
Angara was on one of those errands on a Tuesday morning, Feb. 8, when she disappeared. It wasn't until the next day, after officials drained 9 million gallons of water from huge tanks that run beneath the plant, that she was found.
Authorities believe someone pushed or forced Angara through a 4- by 4-foot access panel in the tunnel floor. It was a 5-foot fall before she hit water 30 feet deep. There was no ladder, no way to jump back up. In the inky blackness of the underground vat, Angara drowned in the 36-degree water, an autopsy showed.
Her body eventually was pulled by suction through a 4-foot pipe into another tank and then into a sump area, 5 feet deeper still.
Avigliano said investigators do not believe Angara committed suicide. Nor do they believe it was an accident, in part because someone replaced the steel access panel separating the tunnel floor from the mammoth tank.
While investigators initially were uncertain about the panel's position, interviews with police officers and firefighters summoned to search for Angara suggest the panel was in place or nearly in place.
There is more behind the homicide designation, but Avigliano said he cannot discuss it. Asked if Angara's body had suffered trauma that might suggest she was murdered, the prosecutor responded: "The cause of death is drowning. Drowning does not give rise to a homicide (designation), so obviously, there was something else."
Something other than the access panel being replaced?
Here's the link to story on Fox from NY Post....
Meanwhile, prosecutors have taken the extraordinary step of pulling the files on the unsolved 1976 murder of a female worker at a Hoffmann-La Roche plant worker in Clifton.
Just like the water-treatment plant in Totowa, the Clifton complex "was an extremely secure facility and they never found out who did it," said Avigliano.
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/40049.htm