Tyrone Ragland knew her as “Ms. Ethel,” the older woman with wire-rim glasses and wavy red hair worn in a bun. Ethel Parish helped him out from time to time, giving him food and paying him for odd jobs around her apartment in the public housing complex in the Bronx where they both lived.

On the evening of Jan. 5, 2011, Mr. Ragland was helping Ms. Parish, 70, take her air-conditioners out for the winter. But after they argued about how much Ms. Parish owed him for his work, Mr. Ragland, high on crack and in debt to a drug dealer, grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter. “I picked it up and cut her,” he told the police. Her body was discovered on the floor, stabbed 17 times.

Today, a painful question haunts Ms. Parish’s daughters: Why was Mr. Ragland not in prison in the first place?

On the day Ms. Parish died, he had two felony cases pending against him in the Bronx courts. One was a grand larceny charge, arising out of a car theft, that had been open for 15 months, more than twice the court’s standard for excessive delays. The other, a robbery charge involving a street holdup, was now more than a year old. And the Bronx judges who allowed Mr. Ragland, 52, to remain free on bail after each arrest had another reason to suspect he could be dangerous: He had already served 15 years in prison for manslaughter for stabbing an elderly man 41 times.