Two brothers were stabbed, one fatally, following a dispute over a parking spot near their Brooklyn home late Sunday night, police said.
Omari Dahan, 23, had arrived at his house on East 73rd Street in Bergen Beach shortly before 11:30 p.m. to find his driveway blocked, according to NYPD Assistant Chief Patrick Conry.
When Dahan started honking his horn, the suspect, 41-year-old Djems Jean-Paul, came out of a nearby home and the two men began arguing, Conry said. Dahan’s 28-year-old brother got involved after Jean-Paul threw a punch, he said. Jean-Paul then pulled a knife and attacked the brothers, he said.
Dahan was stabbed in the chest and later pronounced dead at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital. His brother, who was not immediately identified, suffered a stab wound to the left arm and was taken to the same hospital where he was in stable condition, the NYPD said.
Neighbor Ricky Zawacki, 28, said he heard yelling and screaming Sunday night before Dahan was stabbed.
“It was just a whole mess. It was absolutely horrendous,” he said, adding Dahan’s mother came out after he was fatally injured. “She was screaming and crying.”
His mother sat on the floor next to her dying son as another neighbor held his chest in an attempt to stop the bleeding, Zawacki said.
“He was white, he was very pale,” he said. “They were doing CPR on him for like 20 minutes.”
Jean-Paul fled the scene after the stabbings, but officers caught up with him at Kennedy Airport, where he had booked a JetBlue flight to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Conry said.
Jean-Paul was charged with manslaughter, second-degree assault and criminal possession of a weapon Monday afternoon, police said.
Zawacki said Dahan was nice and polite, and shouldn’t have been killed, especially over something as trivial as a parking spot.
“It was horrible. It should have never have happened,” he said. “For that to happen was absolutely absurd.”
With Lauren Cook
