Officers arriving on the scene, including Officer Karen Pan, described finding a woman “with blood all over her clothes and in her hair” standing on the landing of a staircase. The unknown woman — later identified as Rosemond Dane — had her hands behind her back, and authorities were uncertain whether she was armed.
“When we asked her to move to the side, she stared at us,” Pan recalled. “And then she actually fainted.”
Dane’s hands were duct-taped behind her back.
Upon entering the apartment, police found an injured Veader. Two other men — later identified as Stephen King and Charles “Trey” Helliwell — were also found duct-taped, though dead on the scene. According to Pan, they soon found the apartment’s renter, Jennifer Stahl, 39, in a makeshift music studio adjacent to the living room. She was alive but “struggling to breathe,” Pan told New York Homicide.
Each of the five victims had been shot in the back of the head.
A Carnegie Deli employee later told detectives she saw two Black men running away from the building at the time of the homicides, one with dreadlocks.
Dane, Veader, and Stahl were rushed to a nearby hospital, though Stahl would succumb to her injuries before morning.