"All the signs were there," Delgado, 33, a bar owner in Fayetteville, said yesterday. "All her friends warned her. He wasn't right in the head. She knew it.
"She didn't think things like that could happen. She thought they only happened on television."
So, when Delgado got the phone call Wednesday that Givens was dead, she screamed, and she knew.
"I said, 'What the hell did he do to her?' " Delgado said.
Investigators believe that Navek killed Givens, 35, inside her Fayetteville home sometime in the days before he traveled hundreds of miles to South Jersey and allegedly murdered a former colleague Wednesday outside his home in Voorhees.
The Camden County Prosecutor's Office said that Navek and Givens had traveled to Philadelphia for Easter to visit Navek's family in South Philadelphia. They stayed until Sunday, then returned to North Carolina.
Family members in Philadelphia told authorities that Navek was back in the area by 8 p.m. on Tuesday, without Givens. He left his Mercedes in the city and borrowed a family member's Nissan.
Shortly before 7:30 a.m., Navek was waiting outside the home of Dr. Payman Houshmandpour at The Club, an upscale apartment complex in Voorhees, authorities said. Both men once worked together as residents in Virtua Hospital's Family Medicine Residency Program. Authorities and former colleagues said that Navek blamed Houshmandpour for his dismissal from the program about 18 months ago.
After Houshmandpour, who was married with a young child, got into his Audi, Navek allegedly blasted rounds through the driver-side window. Houshmandpour died at the scene. Navek shot himself in the head after Voorhees police pulled him over nearby. Authorities found a Sig Sauer .357 handgun at the scene.
Investigators in North Carolina discovered Givens' body at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday after she didn't show up for work. She also had been shot.
Navek appeared to split his time between North Carolina and a large home in Williamstown, Gloucester County, where he lived with a fiancée, Dr. Shohreh Sameni, and their young son.
Neighbors said that Sameni, who is listed as a resident on Virtua's website as well, moved out recently with the boy. The Camden County Prosecutor's Office said that she filed a report with police on March 22, claiming that Navek fired two shots into a basement wall of the home and was threatening her. She told police that the incidents happened in February but that she did not report them until after he left for his job in North Carolina.
No charges were filed, the prosecutor's office said, and Sameni did not request a restraining order. Neither Sameni nor her family could be reached for comment Thursday.
A woman who said that she was a nurse for Navek's mother said that the woman was too distraught to talk Thursday. According to 6ABC, Navek had been a captain in the Army Reserve and had served stateside from February to July 2011.
Navek was also a paramedic in Philadelphia from 1996 to 2000. Former colleagues in Philadelphia told the Inquirer that Navek was "troubled" and "competitive," and mentioned that he met his first wife while working as a paramedic in the city.
That woman declined to comment when reached by the Daily News on Wednesday afternoon.
Delgado said that Givens and Navek were together for only a few months and that there had been signs of physical and mental abuse early on. She said that Navek was tall and charismatic, and drove his expensive Mercedes like "a bat out of hell."
"There was some type of strange, deadly attraction there," she said. "It perplexes me that a man who dedicated his life to saving lives had absolutely no respect for them."
Contact Jason Nark at 215-854-5916 or narkj@phillynews.com, or follow on Twitter @JasonNark.
