A 16-year-old Brooklyn girl was stabbed to death in her Brooklyn apartment today and police want to question her 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 horrific discovery.
The teen had been stabbed numerous times and was pronounced dead at the scene. There was no sign of forced entry.
One neighbor 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.
“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 apartment. She and the victim’s grandmother were taken to a hospital.
Police sources said cops want to talk to the cousin, who was in the apartment some time before the victim’s mother came home.
They said there may have been an argument before the killing.
The family had recently taken in the cousin, sources and neighbors said.
A building resident said other relatives advised the mother not to so do because they claimed t the cousin 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