Police: Day care worker stabs 3 infants, 2 adults

NEW YORK — Kayla Cho woke up shortly after 3:30 a.m. Friday to the sound of screaming coming from a home on the block where she lives. Soon the frightening noises turned into a cry for help from what neighbors described as a day care in a red brick townhouse in Queens, N.Y. “A woman was screaming, ‘Help me! Somebody just help me!’ ” Cho said.

Moments later, police swarmed the block and discovered a ghastly scene: three infants, including a 3-day-old, and two adults, had been stabbed by an employee who then cut her own wrist.

The stabbings occurred about 3:40 a.m. at the facility, a residential day care center in the Flushing neighborhood, police said. The infants, all of whom were less than 1 month old, were taken to New York Presbyterian Hospital. One of the adults who was stabbed was the father of one of the infants, police said; he was stabbed in the leg. The other adult was a co-worker of the employee and was stabbed in the torso, police said. All of the victims were in critical but stable condition.

The facility was first identified as a day care center but, according to the New York state Office of Children and Family Services, the facility was not a licensed or regulated child care program.

Cho said there were “many people living there, many kids.”

On Friday morning, all three infants, two girls and a boy, were in critical condition; one of the girls suffered more serious injuries than the others, said Juanita Holmes, assistant chief in the police department’s Patrol Borough Queens North.

When officers first arrived at the location, the employee who had cut her own wrist was unconscious, police said. But she regained consciousness after officers applied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, and the employee, 52, was placed in police custody.

Two police investigators in white crime scene suits went in and out of the home all Friday morning. An officer behind the house guarded a large, white passenger van.

Two knives were recovered at the scene, police said. Also visible Friday morning beside the townhouse’s welcome mat and next to a diaper box was a puddle of blood.

The day care facility is inside a house in Flushing that is home to multiple families and nine infants, police said.

The names of the five victims and the employee were not released. No information was available about the motive.