A 31-year-old woman was fatally stabbed inside her Queens apartment Wednesday, authorities said, shortly before her boyfriend climbed onto the roof of the seven-story building and plunged over the edge in a disturbing incident captured on video.
Pheona Premraji was discovered shortly before noon in the second-floor apartment on Neilson Street near Dinsmore Avenue in Far Rockaway. She had suffered multiple slash wounds to her face, neck and body, allegedly inflicted by her 32-year-old boyfriend, according to law enforcement sources.
Sources said a knife believed to be the murder weapon was found discarded beside her body.
After the alleged attack, the man made his way to the roof, where witnesses said he appeared poised to jump.
Frightened neighbors urged him to come down, with some shouting to him in Spanish. He briefly moved away from the edge, but later returned. Video showed him pacing across the rooftop before falling from the building.
“When the cops came, they came flooding in kind of hot,” witness Moise Guerrier, who lived on the sixth floor, told The Post. “Then he went from laying down only [on the edge of the roof] to actually coming over it. He started dangling, and I guess they tried to bum rush inside to go to the roof.”
“He let go and fell pretty much headfirst, six stories,” Guerrier said.
Police found the man badly injured, with slash wounds on his wrists, ankles and torso. He was taken to Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital in critical condition, according to law enforcement sources.
The boyfriend remained hospitalized Thursday afternoon and had not been formally charged.
Authorities had not determined how he suffered the cutting injuries.
The rooftop fall ultimately helped lead police to Premraji’s body. According to sources, the building superintendent told officers that the jumper lived in the second-floor apartment.
Premraji’s 69-year-old uncle, who identified himself as Harry, said she had been in a relationship with the man for roughly six years. He also said his niece had told the family that her boyfriend was abusive.
“He’s not a nice guy. He never works,” Harry said. “She works all the time, and he takes her money and does what he wants.”
“He beat her a lot of times,” he added. “She left and came to live by me, but she would come back to him.”
A neighbor who lived on the second floor said the couple’s relationship had been marked by repeated conflict and that the boyfriend appeared to want Premraji out of the apartment.
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“They fought. I knew because they would call the cops, and the cops would be here,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “I live all the way down the hall. All I heard was yelling.”
“From what I understand, he wanted her to leave, and she wouldn’t leave,” the neighbor said. “The apartment is his. It wasn’t working out. From what I heard, he said, ‘You need to go. Please leave.’ And she said, ‘I’m not going nowhere.’”
The resident said the couple’s most serious disputes had occurred about a year earlier, although she believed he had first asked Premraji to move out nearly three years ago.
A sixth-floor resident described the couple as “always fighting” and called the killing “disgusting.”
The alleged attacker had four reported domestic-dispute incidents on record, including two involving Premraji, sources said.
On April 5, he allegedly threw Premraji’s computer on the floor, and then she tossed his phone, according to the sources.
Cops were also called on Christmas Eve in 2020 when the two got into a heated fight about their relationship, the sources said.
Sources also said police were called when the man apparently punched his female cousin in the mouth and knocked out one of her teeth.
Despite her domestic troubles, Premraji always made time for her family, according to her cousin, Akbar Khan, 47.
“This generation, they live with their family once, then they don’t care about family and stuff like that,” Khan said. “But she’d always be there for her family.”
He said he last spoke to his cousin just “a few days ago.”
“We spoke about ‘summer’s over’ and stuff like that – what we’re gonna do next summer,” he explained.
Premraji was particularly close with her father, who brought her from Guyana to the US as a child, according to Khan.
“Every week she’d go visit her father, spend time with her father, then come back to her place where she lives,” he said.
“He worked so hard….to bring her here, give her an education, send her to college, and then somebody has to take her life,” Khan added.
“But somebody who’d do this to her is really terrible.”