A 16-year-old Brooklyn girl was viciously stabbed to death in her apartment yesterday and police want to question a female cousin, who law-enforcement sources said had recently moved in with the family.
Shannon Braithewaite was slumped near the front door of the third-floor apartment on Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights when her mom, Marva, came home at about 4:30 p.m.
“Shannon! Shannon is lying on the floor in blood!” the mother shouted to the girl’s aunt, Marilyn, whom she phoned after making the horrible discovery.
The teen had been stabbed numerous times and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Cops said they recovered a bloody kitchen knife.
The aunt said the door was chained when the mother tried to get in the apartment.
One neighbor said she heard the victim screaming, “Mommy! Mommy! Help me!” before the murder.
Another neighbor, Donna Lyons, 41, who lives on the sixth floor, heard the mother’s screams a short time later.
“The mom was in the door and I pushed my head in. She was kneeling on the floor touching [Shannon’s] face,” Lyons said.
“She was crying.”
After receiving the call from the mother, the aunt rushed to the home while neighbors called 911.
The aunt was so overcome with grief that she collapsed on the teen’s body when authorities removed it from the building.
She and the victim’s grandmother, Doreen, were taken to a hospital.
The family had recently taken in two female cousins, according to the victim’s other grandmother, Juliet Waugh.
Police sources said cops want to talk to one of them, describing her as a person of interest. Sources said she was in the apartment some time before the victim’s mother came home.
A building resident said other relatives advised the mother not to take in that cousin because they she was a “bad seed and had problems.”
Relatives said the victim was an “A” student at Manhattan’s Vanguard HS.
The aunt described Shannon as “the daughter I never had.”
“You would want her around your daughter,” she said. “She loved to dance and sing.”
Shannon, who emigrated from Guyana, “doesn’t go running around,” said the aunt. “Church, school and home – that’s it.”
Additional reporting by Ed Robinson and Katherine Romero