National News

Couple Fatally Stabbed in Possible Robbery Outside Brooklyn Home, Police Say

NEW YORK — A couple walking home from work were fatally stabbed Wednesday evening outside their Brooklyn house in what was reported as a robbery, the police said.

Posted Updated

By
MATTHEW HAAG
and
NATE SCHWEBER, New York Times

NEW YORK — A couple walking home from work were fatally stabbed Wednesday evening outside their Brooklyn house in what was reported as a robbery, the police said.

Officers responded to a 911 call at 6:40 p.m. in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood and found the man and the woman unconscious, each with stab wounds. They were about to enter their home when they were attacked, the police said.

The woman, Hazel Brown, who stumbled into the home, on the 200 block of Winthrop Street, near Prospect Park, was pronounced dead at the scene, the police said. The man, Stephenson Bonaparte, who was found outside, was taken to Kings County Hospital Center, where he was pronounced dead.

The police said no arrests had been made, but witnesses said they saw a man in a ski mask running from the scene.

The couple’s daughter, who lives in the house’s upstairs unit with her family and was inside during the attack, heard the struggle outside and found her parents bleeding, a neighbor said. The woman threw a blanket over a young daughter to muffle her cries as she sprinted to the neighbor’s house and banged on his door.

Her parents had been attacked, she told the neighbor, who gave only his first name, Tony. The neighbor rushed to her home and found Bonaparate lying outside in the stairwell to the couple’s basement unit. He was alive but had stab wounds about his neck and head. He was unable to speak.

“Bloody, like movie bloody,” Tony said. “He couldn’t talk. I think blood was in his lungs.”

Emergency responders loaded him into an ambulance and rushed him away. The couple’s daughter told Tony that she believed her mother had fought the attacker and might have kept the intruder from reaching her family’s second-floor home.

“Good people, hardworking people, well-respected people,” Tony said of the couple.

He added that Bonaparte often dropped his wife off at their home in his car before circling the block for a parking space. “They were very loving to each other,” Tony said.

Bonaparte owned a religious gift store, King Soloman Religious, on Rutland Road, about 2 miles from the couple’s home.

Mohammad Rashed, who works at a corner deli next to the religious shop, said Bonaparte walked in at least three times a day to buy peppermint tea. “He is a really good guy,” Rashed said.

The nature of the attack had some echoes of a fatal home invasion in another section of Brooklyn a few months ago. In October, intruders tied up a couple in their brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant during a robbery. The wife, 100, freed herself, but her husband, 91, died.

The police arrested a man and a woman that month in connection with the attack.

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.