It was just after 5 p.m. on the Fourth of July when a bleeding woman staggered out of a Queens apartment building, begging for help.
She had been stabbed in the back.
When police officers from the nearby 103rd Precinct arrived, they found a grisly scene in a fifth-floor apartment: an older son holding his father at knife point; a younger boy nearby, dying from his wounds, the police said.
The officers said the older son was holding his father in a headlock. They told him to drop the knife multiple times in English and Spanish, they said. When he did not, officers fired one round, striking the older son, who dropped the knife, said John Chell, the chief of patrol for the New York Police Department.
The suspect is being treated for his injuries at a nearby hospital.
“This was a tragic and horrific event,” Chief Chell said at a hastily gathered news conference on Thursday evening outside the apartment building, at the corner of Sutphin Boulevard and 94th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens.
Police officials did not speculate on a motive for the attack that left the younger boy, who was 8 years old, dead. The family members’ names were not released, nor was the precise nature of the relationships among them.
Police officials said the investigation was continuing. “This is a domestic incident,” Chief Chell said. “There is a relationship with all them here, and we’ll figure that out.”
The police said that the woman, who is 29, and the father, 43, were expected to recover from their injuries. An 8-month-old girl who was also in the apartment was unharmed, the police said.
Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of operations, said that the officers who had responded to the scene were crushed by the news that the boy had succumbed to his injuries: “One of them said, ‘We wish we could have got here a little sooner to save this young life.’”