By Ivan Pereira
A Rosedale father killed his family inside their home with an assault rifle before taking his own life Sunday night, authorities said.
Mark Bailey, his wife Dionne Coy, and their two teenage daughters, Yanique, 19 and Yolann, 14, were found with gunshot wounds to their heads inside their 230th Place house Monday morning by relatives and police. Mark Bailey, a Jamaican immigrant who worked as a school bus driver in Nassau County, had a note next to his body and was holding the automatic weapon, which Queens district attorney Richard Brown said was used in the murder-suicide.
“It’s very difficult to comprehend how it is someone reaches this point of despair that they would commit an act such as this,” said Brown who surveyed the scene with investigators.
Relatives of the couple, who moved into the neighborhood recently, said that they had no problems and were very friendly to others. Angela Brooks, Dionne’s older sister, said the mother, also a Jamaican immigrant, worked as an assistant principal at Philip Randolph High School in Harlem, and would be dropped there every morning by their other sister, Dorrett Combs.
When Dionne failed to return phone calls this morning, Combs and Brooks’s husband went to the home and called the police.
After a while, the two pried open a window and found the teens and their mother in their beds and Mark Bailey dead in the living room, according to Brooks’s husband who asked not to be named.
“I reached in and shook and I said, ‘Wow,’” he said about approaching one of the beds. “She felt stiff.”
Yanique was a student at Stony Brook University while Yolann was a student at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Bayside, according to Brooks.
The DA said the cause behind the gruesome shooting was still under investigation.
For more information see the full story in this week’s edition of the TimesLedger Newspapers.
Reach reporter Ivan Pereira by e-mail at ipereira@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4546.
