By Rebecca Henely
The daughter of a Sunnyside Filipino couple saw her father standing over her mother’s stabbed body last Thursday before he left the apartment and jumped off the platform of the nearby No. 7 train, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.
The couple, Amis and Jennifer Cale, died later the same day at Elmhurst Hospital Center, police said.
“They seemed like a happy couple,” said 42-year-old Elias Suarez, the super of their building on 39th Place near Queens Boulevard. “That’s why I was surprised.”
Police said they got the 911 call at 8:05 a.m. about a 41-year-old man who stabbed his wife multiple times throughout her body.
“He stabs her to death. He is seen standing over her body by her daughter. He leaves the apartment,” Kelly said as he described the scene. “On the elevated station he walks down to 41st Street, then jumps.”
Suarez said he was alerted to the incident when he heard the ambulance and found Jennifer Cale injured in her apartment. He said her daughter was crying hysterically. The daughter showed police officers a picture of the couple.
“She was in bed,” Suarez said. “She woke up and found her mother in a pool of blood.”
Jennifer Cale was taken to Elmhurst Hospital Center in critical condition, where she later died, police said.
Officers conducted a canvas of the area around the complex, police said. At 9:35 a.m., the officers went to the intersection of 41st Street and Queens Boulevard to find that Amis Cale had gone up to the Manhattan-bound platform of the No. 7 train and jumped off, police said. He was pronounced dead at Elmhurst Hospital, police said.
A CVS employee whose name tag read “John” and who was walking by the scene last Thursday said numerous people have jumped from the platform over the years.
Victor Quinde, 66, said through a Spanish translator that he saw Amis Cale lying on the ground soon after he jumped.
“He says, ‘Let me go through, let me see who it is. Maybe it’s a member of my family,’” the translator said on behalf of Quinde.
Quinde said Amis Cale had a visibly broken bone in his leg and that paramedics had tried to resuscitate him.
He also said he had been on the scene after a Colombian man jumped from the platform about two years ago.
Suarez, who has lived in the couple’s Sunnyside apartment for 20 years and has been the super for 14, said the Jennifer Cale’s mother had lived in the apartment for 16 years and the Cale family had joined them six years ago.
“I never saw any violence or any suspicion that there was violence in the apartment,” he said.
Another neighbor, who declined to tell his name, gave a different story.
“This guy, he looked crazy,” the neighbor said.
Reach reporter Rebecca Henely by e-mail at rhenely@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4564.
