Police arrested a Crown Heights man suspected of murdering his wife inside their Sterling Place home on Wednesday.
Cops responding to a neighbor’s 911 call found 22-year-old Tonie Wells lying unconscious at the foot of her basement stairs at 9:52 am.
Paramedics rushed to the home between Hampton Place and Albany Avenue following the officers’ grisly discovery, and pronounced Wells dead at the scene, according to authorities.
Investigators caught up with the young woman’s husband at 6 pm that evening, when they arrested him with help from officers in the New Rochelle Police Department before taking him to a Bronx hospital for examination after he mentioned an earlier suicide attempt, according to the New York Police Department’s Chief of Detectives, Robert Boyce.
The couple — the parents of a young daughter — married in April, after which police responded to two domestic-violence complaints related to accusations that Wells’ husband abused her, Boyce said, including one July assault that landed him in cuffs after he allegedly strangled his wife.
That case is open and pending, according to a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is overseeing the matter because it occurred in the outer borough.
Police-department brass suspended two officers, Wing Hong Lau and Wael Jaber, pending the outcome of an Internal Affairs Bureau investigation after they failed to properly respond to a 911 call the young mother herself made about an hour before her neighbor called authorities, according to Commissioner James O’Neill.
“We’re conducting internal investigations to look at the actions of those two police officers and, quite frankly, everybody involved in the response to the incident,” the top cop said. “It’s up to us to make sure we fully investigate that, and, if discipline needs to be dealt out, we’ll do that.”
