Astoria, Corona and St. Albans murders

From the NY Times:

A 41-year-old man with a long arrest record was fatally shot, execution-style, just before dawn on Saturday on a street in Astoria, Queens, officials said.

Gunshots rang out on 28th Street, off Ditmars Boulevard, at about 5 a.m., startling neighbors, some outside for a morning walk and others who looked out of their windows to see the victim lying on the ground.

Detectives said that they did not believe the victim was robbed, and that they were pursuing the possibility that the killing was drug-related.

Officials said the dead man, whom they did not immediately identify by name, was a resident of Long Island who had been arrested several times since 1987.

The killing was one of four violent deaths that occurred between late Friday and early Saturday, a burst of three homicides and one death under suspicious circumstances.

On Friday night, officers from the 113th Precinct in Queens responded to a 911 call about a woman discovered lying unconscious in an alleyway on Leslie Road, in the St. Albans neighborhood. Paramedics declared the woman, who had no identification, dead.

The woman had marks on her wrists that may indicate that she had recently been bound, a law enforcement official said. Her face was swollen and her back was bruised, the official said.

A cause of death will be determined by an autopsy, according to the police, who have yet to rule the case a homicide.

Also in Queens, at 2:14 a.m., a 41-year-old man died after two assailants punched him and beat him with a chain, officials said. The attack occurred at 103rd Street and 41st Avenue, in Corona.

Officers working as part of the Police Department’s Operation Impact, which floods officers into high-crime areas, saw two men running and caught them, the police said. The suspects, both in their 20s and both from Corona, were arrested, the police said. A motive in the killing was still being investigated.