(BOSTON GLOBE) — An employee at a P.F. Chang’s in Peabody who was stabbed to death in the restaurant’s kitchen by a co-worker Saturday night was a hardworking immigrant who moved to the United States to escape violence and start a family, his sister said Sunday.
Elivelton Dias, 38, moved from Vitoria, Brazil, to Salem when he was 25 in 2002, hoping to get away from a city with widespread killings. The United States always appealed to him, Eliane Dias, the victim’s sister, said in an online interview translated from Portuguese.
“It hurts so much. He liked it so much there,” Eliane Dias wrote. “He said there wasn’t violence, that it was a good place to live, to work.”
Elivelton Dias was happy in Salem, enjoying a far more relaxed lifestyle then he was accustomed to in his native Brazil, where his sister said he was “afraid of the violence.” He’d found steady work as a sous chef at the P.F. Chang’s in the Northshore Mall, where he’d been employed for “many years,” she said. His wife had just given birth to a baby girl on Aug. 22 — his only child. He was an excellent cook, his sister said.
