Grandparents fatally stabbed at their home in Brooklyn
PROSPECT LEFFERTS GARDENS, Brooklyn (WABC) -- Police say a man and a woman were fatally stabbed by a mask-wearing suspect at their home in Brooklyn Wednesday night.
Police responded to a 911 call of a robbery in progress on Winthrop Street in Prospect Lefferts Gardens at about 6:40 p.m.
First responders rushed to the usually quiet block off Nostrand Avenue to find a bloody scene. A man lay motionless outside his home. His wife's body was inside. Both had been stabbed in the neck.
Detectives say 65-year-old Stephenson Bonaparte and 59-year-old Hazel Brown arrived home from work, only to be confronted on the sidewalk by a masked man with a knife.
Police don't know if the grandparents were stabbed outside and Brown ran in mortally wounded or if she was followed into their house and attacked there.
They also don't know the motive for the attack, though they are treating it as a random robbery. Their adult daughter with her baby witnessed the aftermath of the attack.
Surveillance video showed them walking up to her parents' neighbor's house after calling 911.
"She knocked on my door my son said, she was holding the baby, she didn't have anything on, she just had a robe on," said Hillary Favigny, a neighbor.
On the block of brownstones, where generations of families have enjoyed block parties together and watched each other's kids grow up, no one could believe the violence that claimed their long-time neighbors.
"They were very nice. Like family, the whole block," said one neighbor. "It's scary. It's scary. Because now we don't know where it came from, who it was."
The couple owned a store that sold religious items, and detectives want to know whether that could be part of the motive.
Police towed away the couple's car. Police say the murder's don't appear to be random. They were also interviewing the couple's daughter as part of the investigation.
----------
