A 52-year-old employee of the day care facility was in police custody after the stabbing. The police said she cut her own wrist.
Three infants, including a 3-day-old child, and two adults were in critical but stable condition after being stabbed at a day care facility in Queens on Friday by an employee who then cut her own wrist, the police said.
The stabbing occurred at about 3:40 a.m. at the facility, a residential day care center in the Flushing section of Queens, the police said. The infants, all of whom are younger than a month, were taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital after the stabbing. One of the adults who was stabbed was the father of one of the infants, the police said; he was stabbed in the leg. The other adult was a co-worker of the employee and was stabbed in the torso, the police said.
While all three infants, two girls and a boy, were in critical condition, one of the girls suffered more serious injuries than the others, said Juanita Holmes, assistant chief in the police department’s Patrol Borough Queens North. The girl was not initially expected to survive, Chief Holmes said, but her condition has since improved.
When officers first arrived at the location, the employee who had cut her own wrist was unconscious, the police said. But she regained consciousness after officers applied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, and the employee, 52, was placed in police custody.
Two knives were recovered at the scene, the police said.
The day care facility is inside a Flushing house that is home to multiple families and a total of nine infants, the police said. It was not immediately clear whether the facility was registered with the state as a licensed day care center.
The names and ages of the five victims and the employee were not released. No information was immediately available about the motive.
Chief Holmes said that the police had no previous calls to the Flushing home but that New York City’s 311 hotline received a complaint in 2011 about crying children there.
