August 30, 2012 11:29am |
By DNAinfo Staff
SUNNYSIDE — A Sunnyside man fatally stabbed his wife in their home Thursday and then leaped to his death from an elevated train platform nearby during rush hour, the NYPD said.
The murder-suicide started in a third-floor apartment at 45-21 39th Pl., where Amis Cale, 41, allegedly stabbed his wife, Jennifer, in the neck, police said.
“There was a fight between a husband and wife,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
The couple’s 19-year-old daughter was awakened by a scream to find her father holding a knife and standing over her mother, who was lying in a pool of blood.
“He is seen standing over the body by their daughter,” Kelly added. “He leaves the apartment.”
Jennifer Cale, 37, was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital with severe cuts to her neck, the FDNY said.
About 9:30 a.m., Amis Cale ran to the nearby 40th Street elevated 7 train station, some 50 feet above ground, to apparently take his own life.
“On the elevated station,” Kelly said, “he walks down to 41st Street and then jumps.”
Amis Cale’s suicide happened just as commuters were heading to work.
“He was just lying there on his back,” said Rich Culley, 52, a supervisor of a construction site across the street from the train platform.
Amis Cale was taken to Elmhurst Hospital, too, and died about an hour later, police said.
Elias Suarez, the superintendent of the building where the couple lived, said he ran up to the third floor apartment when he heard screaming.
He found the couple’s daughter curled up in bed crying with photographs of her parents. The daughter was later seen in blood-stained clothes showing the photos to police.
“I never knew of any problems, of any domestic violence,” Elias Suarez said. “They always seemed like a happy couple.”
Jennifer and Amis Cale had lived in the apartment for six years with Jennifer Cale’s mother, Erlida Rivera, who’s lived in the building for 16 years, Suarez said.
It wasn’t known whether there was a history of domestic violence at the home, police said. A spokeswoman for the Queens District Attorney office said neither Jennifer nor Amis Cale had a criminal history.
Vanessa Suarez, 64, who lives on the fourth floor in the couple’s building, said Jennifer Cale had been trying to get her husband out of their home.
“She wanted him out of the apartment but he did not have a place to go,” Suarez said.
