NY Daily News – September 10, 2014
by Nancy Dillon, Rocco Parascandola, Erik Badia, Tina Moore
A Queens man with money troubles knifed his wife and their brainy 16-year-old son to death, torched their apartment and then killed himself Tuesday, police sources said. Firefighters found the three bodies when they were called to the family’s Flushing apartment just before 5 a.m. when neighbors reported smoke.
The bodies were stacked up on the living room floor with their throats slashed and a blanket under them ablaze.
Investigators also found a note, believed to be written by the father, that talked about being unable to pay the rent, a source said. The dad’s wrists were cut, indicative of suicide.
“This is a double murder-suicide,” the source said. “They found some sort of note that indicates this. Because of the nature of the note, they’re now classifying this a double murder-suicide.”
A family friend identified the dead as mom Sung Lee, who worked in a nail salon, father Joon Lee, who drove a tractor-trailer, and son Brian Lee, a student at Brooklyn Technical High School.
The friend, who didn’t want to be identified, said the mom and son went back-to-school shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch on Monday. Records show that the couple filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2005 with about $100,000 in debt.
Under the bodies in the living room, detectives found the blade of a knife, the source said. And there was a blood trail and spattered blood in other areas of the apartment, police sources said.
Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said the bodies had not been formally identified.
“The bodies are in such condition that we cannot identify them right now,” he said.
Ruth Markes, a dispatcher at Pig Tainer trucking in Kearny, N.J., where Lee worked, said she heard about the deaths on the morning news and was shocked to learn he was involved.
“But then he wasn’t answering his phone, which wasn’t like him,” she said. “He (was) the type of worker who always shows up early.”
She said Lee had been working for the company for a decade and was just at work the night before. Detectives visited the business in the morning.
“We’re very surprised that it might be a murder-suicide,” she said, adding that she’d never met Lee’s family. “He was taking home good money … He never talked about his family or any problems at home.”
A longtime neighbor of the Lee family on the top floor of the six-story building said he heard a lot of commotion early Tuesday morning.
“I heard some banging, it sounded like glass breaking,” Lo Lee, who’s not related to the family and who lived next door, said through a translator.
He said he heard sirens shortly after, but didn’t go out of his house until later in the morning when cops had set up a crime scene.
Lo Lee said the scene inside the apartment — which he saw through the open door — was gruesome.
“There was a lot of blood,” he said. “There was blood everywhere.”
A police source said there had been no police responses or domestic incident reports at the residence.
Councilman Peter Koo (D-Flushing) called the deaths a tragedy after arriving on the scene, and noted that another murder-suicide had occurred in the area Monday.
“Right now it’s the Moon Festival, which is the second biggest day in the Asian community behind the New Year,” he said. “The timing of these incidents is very troubling to the community.”
Koo said that many people don’t realize Asian-Americans have the same problems as everyone else.
“A lot of Asian people are more introverted. They keep the problems inside the family. (We) don’t talk about our problems a lot, but Asian-Americans, we have problems like everyone else,” he said.
The blaze was on the top floor of the six-story building.
Three firefighters suffered minor injuries while battling the flames and were taken to area hospitals. The fire was out by 5:24 a.m.
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