Her dad came to her party, then he killed her family
NEWYORK— A man attending his daughter’s ninth birthday party in Brooklyn on Monday turned the joyful celebration into a horrific scene when he shot and killed her mother and two sisters.
The man, Joseph McCrimon, then left the girl inside the apartment in a public housing project in Brownsville and shot himself in the head on a nearby sidewalk, police said. The final act was captured by a security camera.
The frightened girl called 911 around 11:15 p.m. and told police that her father was coming to her party but “he didn’t bring presents,” Chief of Detectives James Essig said.
Investigators were still working to determine a motive for the killings, and had interviewed family members. McCrimon and the girl’s mother had a 20-year romantic relationship, which Essig described as “very rocky.”
“We know he left in an agitated state to meet her,” he said. Still, the police had not received other domestic violence complaints or 911 calls about the pair, he said.
The police identified the girl’s mother as Rasheeda Barzey, 45, and her sisters as Solei Spears, 20, and Chloe Spears, 16. They were all shot in the head. The girl, whom police said was 8 or 9, was not injured, police said.
Officers found McCrimon, 46, a former felon whose name was also given as McCrimons, with a wound to the head. Police found a gun in the apartment and one next to his body.
Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said he had watched body-camera footage recorded by the officers who responded to the 911 call. “It would tear your heart out to see the young girl from that crime,” he said.
Barzey was an administrative manager for the city’s public hospital system. Her oldest daughter, Solei Spears, was a student at Baruch College.
“It’s sad because the girl lost her parents,” said Denessa Temple, 45, who lived down the hall from the family. “And you don’t know if she has any relatives. She’s going to be traumatized for the rest of her life.”
McCrimon was convicted of first-degree manslaughter in 1995, after Hempstead police said he shot a sanitation worker in the back on Halloween two years earlier.
The victim, Eugene Grant, Jr., 28, had just broken up a street fight involving McCrimon’s nephew. He left behind five children. McCrimon, who was 18 at the time of the shooting, claimed that the gun fell out of his pocket and went off while the victim was reaching for it.
McCrimon was incarcerated in 1995, according to state corrections records. He was granted conditional release in 2000 but sent back to prison for an unspecified violation in 2003, state records show. McCrimon was released from Sing Sing Correctional Facility months later, in August 2003, after serving his sentence.
In 2013, McCrimon was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to robbing a bank in the Hudson Valley. He later denied committing the crime and convinced an appeals court to reduce his sentence. In a pre-sentencing memo, federal prosecutors noted that he did not accept responsibility for either the robbery or the killing and said that he was “an unlikely candidate for rehabilitation.”