What to Know
- Five people, including three infants, were stabbed at a Queens maternity center early Friday, authorities said
- All of the stabbed infants are a month old or younger; there were nine babies in the Flushing house at the time, officials say
- A 52-year-old woman, was found in the basement of the Flushing center with self-inflicted slash wounds on her wrist; she is in custody
In the middle of the night, a 52-year-old woman working at a maternity center in Queens allegedly knifed a colleague eight times in the stomach, stabbed a father who tried to intervene and then began attacking days-old babies.
Two people called 911. And those calls, made shortly before 4 a.m. Friday, revealed abject terror.
"Help, help, help," the first call began. "Hurry up, because my baby's already been stabbed twice. Someone came in and stabbed my baby twice."
The dispatcher asked to be sure -- "Someone stabbed her baby, she said?"
"Yes," the caller said. There was crying. "I don't know this person ... I don't know where this person came from."
Shortly thereafter, there was a second call.
"I'm sleeping ... and then I heard somebody yelling ... and then they are killing people," the second caller said. "I just saw the blood on the floor ... and that somebody got hurt."
The dispatcher asked if the killer was still in the house.
"I don't know. I don't know. I cannot go out to check," the caller said. "I'm afraid."
The 911 callers' connections to the maternity center weren't immediately revealed. In total, five people were stabbed: three of them were baby girls no older than one month; one was a female worker, the other a father of one of the nine children who happened to be in the center at the time. It wasn't clear if his child was among the three girls stabbed.
Neither the name of the suspect, who cops say tried to kill herself in the basement of the Flushing facility, nor the names of the victims have been released. Charges are pending against the suspect.
No possible motive has been revealed. Police said they received one 311 call there years ago -- a call about children screaming in 2011.
