A Queens man who allegedly stabbed his girlfriend to death survived a seven-story plunge from his building’s roof Wednesday after panicked neighbors watched him teeter on the ledge and fall.
Pheona Premraji, 31, was discovered slashed across her face, neck and body inside the second-floor apartment on Neilson Street near Dinsmore Avenue in Far Rockaway just before noon, authorities said. The murder weapon lay discarded beside her. Her 32-year-old boyfriend, who had not been charged by Thursday afternoon, remained hospitalized in critical condition at Mount Sinai South Nassau with slash wounds to his wrists, ankles and torso.
The NYPD found Premraji only after the man’s dramatic fall, when the building superintendent directed officers to his second-floor unit, according to law enforcement sources. Cops had flooded the scene responding to reports of a man poised to jump.
Moise Guerrier, a sixth-floor resident, told The Post he watched the scene unfold from his vantage point. “When the cops came, they came flooding in kind of hot,” Guerrier said. “Then, he went from laying down only [on the edge of roof] to actually, like coming over it, and then he started dangling, and I guess they tried to bum rush inside to go to the roof.”
“He let go and [fell] pretty much head first, six stories,” Guerrier continued.
Witnesses said neighbors had pleaded with the man in Spanish and English to step back from the ledge, but he paced the roof’s edge before walking off. Harrowing video captured his final moments above the street.
Premraji’s 69-year-old uncle Harry, who said she had dated her alleged killer for roughly six years, painted a portrait of prolonged abuse. “He’s not a nice guy. He never works,” Harry said. “She works all the time and he takes her money and does what he wants.”
“He beat her a lot of times, man. She left and came to live by me, but she would come back [to him],” Harry added.
A second-floor neighbor who requested anonymity told The Post the apartment belonged to the boyfriend and that he had wanted Premraji out for years. “They fought, I knew because they would call the cops and the cops would be here,” the woman said. “I live all the way down the hall. All I heard was yelling.”
“And from what I understand, he wanted her to leave, and she wouldn’t leave,” she continued. “The apartment is his. It wasn’t working out. … From what I understood, I heard him say, ‘You need to go. Please leave.’ And she says, ‘I’m not going nowhere.'”
The neighbor added that the worst of the fighting dated back about a year, though the eviction requests stretched nearly three years. Another sixth-floor resident said the couple was “always fighting,” adding, “It’s disgusting what he did to his [girlfriend].”
Law enforcement sources said the man had four reported domestic disputes on record, two involving Premraji directly. On April 5, he allegedly threw her computer to the floor before she retaliated by tossing his phone. Police had also intervened on Christmas Eve 2020 when the couple fought about their relationship. In a separate incident, sources said, he punched a female cousin in the mouth, knocking out a tooth.
Akbar Khan, 47, Premraji’s cousin, remembered her devotion to family despite the turbulent relationship. “This generation, they live with their family once, then they don’t care about family and stuff like that,” Khan said. “But she’d always be there for her family.”
He had spoken with her just days before her death. “We spoke about ‘summer’s over’ and stuff like that – what we’re gonna do next summer,” Khan explained.
Premraji’s father had brought her from Guyana to the United States as a child, and Khan said she visited him weekly. “Every week she’d go visit her father, spend time with her father, then come back to her place where she lives,” Khan said. “He worked so hard….to bring her here, give her an education, send her to college, and then somebody has to take her life.”
“But somebody who’d do this to her is really terrible,” Khan added.
The boyfriend had not been charged as of Thursday afternoon, and it remained unclear how he sustained his own slash wounds.