A Friend Indeed
Last week was a wild and wooly one for area families. Along with the usual wife-beatings and ex-lover shootings, mothers were bashing their teenage daughters to death with hammers, and grandmothers were being strangled by their daughters' lesbian lovers.
In one of the few instances that didn't end in homicide, a 50-year-old Staten Island woman finally lost it with her 45-year-old brother.
Rosa and Samuel McDuffie live together in Slosson Terrace. Samuel told the Post that his sister recently lost a job she'd held for 30 years, and so was understandably on edge. What exactly sparked the Saturday-night fracas is unclear, but it only came to an end after Rosa slashed her brother's arm with a knife before yanking the chicken out of the oven and hurling it at him.
Samuel was treated for cuts and burns. Rosa's being charged with the typical array: harassment, weapons and second degree assault.
We're sure 35-year-old Julio Negron's friends meant well, but sometimes that doesn't mean squat.
The story began around dawn on Feb. 6. Negron (who was soused) and Brooklyn resident Mervin Fevrier began arguing over a parking spot in Ridgewood. After going nose-to-nose, Negron returned to his car, grabbed his gun and shot Fevrier in the leg before fleeing.
According to the Post, Fevrier went to the hospital for treatment, but mysteriously checked himself out. That's when cops discovered he'd given them a fake address. Nevertheless, intrepid investigators soon tracked down Negron, a school janitor, and charged him with the shooting.
With Negron in custody, his downstairs neighbors Fernando Caban and Monica Guartan, assuming police would soon be searching Negron's apartment, decided to help their buddy out.
They let themselves into his place and started filling bags with Negron's arsenal of guns, his fake detective badges and the thousands in counterfeit bills he had stashed there. These they dragged up to the roof for safekeeping.
Neighbors became alarmed by all the weird noises coming from the roof and called the police-and cops don't need a search warrant to look on the roof.
A 34-year-old Bed-Stuy man learned that he'd clearly overstayed his welcome when he was awakened from a gentle sleep at 6 a.m. on Feb. 1. According to the Post, his host-39-year-old Christopher Dukes-was standing over him with a knife and a hammer (which is never something you want to wake up to). Then, while shrieking, "I can't take it anymore!," Dukes began whacking his houseguest in the head with the hammer.
The man ran from the building, called the cops and was taken to the hospital, where he was treated for a skull fracture.
Then on Feb. 9, the man ran into Dukes again on the street. Still fuming over some breach of etiquette we may never understand, Dukes pulled a knife. Luckily for the bad guest, a cop happened to be passing by and collared Dukes.