Police Seek Motive in Stabbings at Brooklyn Home

NEW YORK — The stabbing deaths of a Brooklyn couple may have been related to a dispute at their religious supply store of candles and scented oils in a nearby section of the Brownsville neighborhood, the police said Thursday.

No arrests have been made in the deaths of Hazel Brown and Stephenson Bonaparte, both from Trinidad, who were stabbed Wednesday night in and outside their home on Winthrop Street near Prospect Park in Prospect Lefferts Gardens.

“We’re not saying it’s a robbery, a robbery gone bad, a home invasion; it’s not the issue,” said Robert K. Boyce, the chief of detectives for the New York Police Department. “We think it’s something else,” he said without elaborating.

He said detectives were looking into an argument the couple had with a customer that day at their store, King Soloman Religious Store on Rutland Road, which the couple had operated for years and where Bonaparte was known as a pastor.

“We believe it’s something to do with their business; they own a religious store,” Boyce said. “We’re going to do a search warrant on the store to see exactly what’s going on. So we’re a long way away from where we need to be on this case, but we have a lot of people speaking to us in the neighborhood because everybody liked them; they were nice people.”

Workers at neighboring shops said that King Soloman had a modest but loyal clientele, and that besides selling candles and oils, the store offered tarot card readings.

“We have a first name of an individual there they had an argument with,” Boyce said, with little more than that as a lead. “So, we will figure that out in the next couple of days as we go forward with the case. Who this fellow is and whether he’s from the neighborhood.”

Raymond Ragues, a lawyer who handled separate bankruptcy petitions for the couple, called them and their store a fixture in the neighborhood. “They called it voodoo, occult,” he said of the store’s inventory.

“It was a tiny little store,” he said. “If you had money problems, buy this candle. If you have love problems, buy this soap.”

Ragues described their bankruptcies as routine. “They were struggling along with bills,” he said. “Nothing else. Nothing nasty.” Bonaparte, 65, filed for bankruptcy in 2015, and Brown, 59, did the same thing last year. Their petitions listed modest incomes and expenses, including car payments and credit cards.

On Wednesday, Brown and Bonaparte were at some sort of religious event, Boyce said. “He’s not feeling well, so he has to go home a little bit earlier than they would have.”

Investigators believe that Bonaparte parked the car while Brown went into the apartment and that the attacker struck Bonaparte outside before going inside and stabbing Brown.

“The door is open and that’s how the perpetrator makes entry,” the chief said, “and then he goes in and accosts her, he stabs her.”

The killer was described as a black man wearing a ski mask.

Boyce said the couple’s daughter, who was upstairs, saw the attacker “running out with the knife in his hand.”

Neighbors interviewed on Thursday thought back to the previous day. When a home health aide named Desiree learned of the killings, she had a chilling realization.

She said she had walked by the house minutes before the time that police said the stabbings occurred and noticed a man in a black hooded sweatshirt and black pants standing against the house’s chain-link fence and looking out toward the street. It was sleeting, so the sight of the loitering man struck Desiree, who did not give her last name for fear of becoming a target.

“I said, ‘good night” to him, he said ‘good night’ to me,” Desiree said. Later, “it really clicked that I passed somebody, like somebody waiting.”