Mother kills her twin babies in Woodside Houses

 

QNS

Two infants were found dead inside a Woodside apartment on Thursday afternoon, and detectives are now questioning their 23-year-old mother.

Police made the horrific discovery while responding with FDNY units to a wellness check called in at about 3:10 p.m. on April 22 at the Woodside Houses, located at 31-76 51st St.

According to Chief of Housing David Barrere, the officers from NYPD Public Service Area 9 met with concerned family members and knocked on the door to the mother’s fifth-floor apartment. Once they got inside, he said, they encountered a nightmarish scene.

Barrere said one of the infants, believed to be six weeks old, was found lifeless inside a crib with trauma to their body. The officers then asked about a second baby inside the home, and the mother pointed them toward a sink.

“Officers discovered a second child under the sink area, wrapped in a blanket, who was also unconscious and unresponsive,” Barrere said.

Responding EMS units pronounced both babies dead at the scene. The Medical Examiner’s office will conduct autopsies to determine the cause of their deaths.

Police immediately took the mother into custody for further questioning. Barrere said that officers also recovered a knife at the scene.

According to Barrere, one of the mother’s relatives called 911 on Thursday out of concern for her children. He did not go into details as to what prompted such concern.

Based on a preliminary investigation, police determined that the mother does not have a prior criminal record. The status of the children’s father remains unknown at this time.

A percentage of babies born in the city wind up homeless in Cuomo's and de Blasio's New York

NY Daily News

One out of a hundred New York City newborns last year went “home” from the hospital to a homeless shelter, a heartbreaking new analysis by the Coalition for the Homeless revealed.

The group’s annual report, to be released Wednesday, lays blame for that and scores of other sobering statistics squarely at the feet of the two most powerful men in New York — Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio.

“New York City’s homelessness crisis will not improve until Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio treat homelessness like the urgent humanitarian crisis it is and acknowledge that it is fueled by the massive lack of affordable housing," said Giselle Routhier, the coalition’s policy director.

Aside from infants, the hardest hit by the homelessness crisis in recent years are the elderly, blacks and Hispanics, according to the report.

De Blasio has made the problem worse through a policy that “exacerbates" a housing market divided between the rich and poor and that creates too many high-rent units and not enough that are affordable, the report says.

The coalition also blamed Cuomo for implementing “damaging cost-shifting practices" that lowered the amount of money the state put toward addressing homelessness, putting further financial stress on the city.

“Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo seem content with minimalist, symbolic and too-often harmful actions made under the pretense of attempting to manage the problem, rather than taking the substantive steps needed to solve it," the report states.

Two month old twins die in hotel homeless shelter

NY Daily News

Authorities are investigating the deaths of 2-month old twins who were staying with their family in a city homeless shelter, police said Friday.

Emergency responders found the twins, a boy and a girl, unconscious around 3 p.m. inside the lobby of the Landing, a Queens hotel that doubles as a city-funded family shelter.

Medics rushed them to Elmhurst Hospital Center where they were pronounced dead.

The babies’ father told cops he put the children down for a nap earlier in the day, but found them lifeless when he went to check on them.

Twin infants died Friday afternoon after they fell unconscious at a Queens homeless shelter, police said.

Cops were questioning the father Friday. No charges have been filed.

“This is a heartbreaking tragedy. We offer our condolences to the family and will provide them with any and all support that we can during this difficult time," said Isaac McGinn, a spokesman for the city Department of Social Services, which is responsible for the shelter system.