By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
Published: January 27, 2010
As the police arrested a neighbor in the stabbing death of a Queens woman on Wednesday, investigators learned of a gruesome discovery by the medical examiner’s office:
her heart and lungs had been ripped from her body.
The police said that the stabbing of the woman, Qian Wu, 46, was the culmination of years of harassment by the suspect, Huang Chen, 47, who lives two doors away from the victim in Flushing.
In 2006, Mr. Cheng spent 30 days in jail for choking her and punching her in the face, and since then Ms. Wu had received at least five orders of protection against him. The Queens district attorney’s office charged Mr. Chen with second-degree murder, as well as with stalking, possession of a weapon and tampering with evidence. A woman was also arrested, charged with helping dispose of the murder weapons — which the authorities said were a hammer and a utility knife.
The police said they did not know the whereabouts of Ms. Wu’s lungs and heart, and were searching for them.
The police said Mr. Chen met Ms. Wu in 2006 when he went to her home-based employment agency looking for help getting a job. According to Ms. Wu’s husband, Yongwei Guo, Mr. Chen made romantic advances toward Ms. Wu, and she rebuffed him.
The police found Ms. Wu’s body around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the second-floor hallway of her building, a three-story walk-up on 40th Road, after a neighbor reported that blood was covering the hallway. Ms. Wu had been hit over the head several times with the hammer and stabbed with the knife, the police said.
About half an hour after Ms. Wu’s body was found, Mr. Chen arrived at New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens with cuts on his legs and arms, and said that he had been assaulted by a robber, the police said. Detectives who saw Mr. Chen at the hospital became suspicious because although he had blood on his shoes, his clothes were clean, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference. Detectives then obtained security videotapes from Mr. Chen’s apartment building.
“They look at the security camera, they see him coming into the building covered in blood, then they see him cleaning up some blood outside the building,” Mr. Kelly said. “A period later, they see him leaving the building with a woman carrying a bag.”
Mr. Kelly said the bag contained the knife, hammer and bloody clothes and was found in a nearby park. Wenxin Zhang, 54, Mr. Chen’s landlady, who the police said was carrying the bag, was charged with evidence-tampering. The victim’s husband, Mr. Guo, said Mr. Chen had tried to approach his wife several times over the past month.
“Please stay inside, don’t go outside,” Mr. Guo said he had told his wife. “This person wants to kill you. He will even come inside to kill you.”
Mr. Guo said he went to sleep around 3 p.m. on Tuesday and awoke around 9 p.m. when he heard a commotion in the hallway. He opened the door to his third-floor apartment and saw police officers there. There was blood spattered on the floor and walls of the second-floor landing of the building, and
his wife’s black hair was stuck to the wall, he said.
Mr. Guo said his wife left the apartment sometime after he fell asleep, probably to go shopping.
“I told her not go to out for groceries and I already got them,” he said. “ ‘I don’t want you going out.’ ”
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Originally Posted by Aslan
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