Parolee Arrested After Deadly Queens Home Invasion
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The dapper suspect who adopted as an alias the name of a famous basketball player was on his way to a parole office when he barged into the house of an Ozone Park man and stabbed him to death, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday in announcing the man’s arrest.
“We were assisted in identifying him when he dropped an envelope at the crime scene, which included his ID and parole papers,” Mr. Kelly said.
The suspect, Albert Massie of Brooklyn, showed up for a scheduled meeting with his parole officer shortly after the killing and was arrested by police officers, who staked out the parole office, Mr. Kelly said. When Massie was arrest ed he was wearing the same outfit he wore when he allegedly committed the home invasion: a white shirt, with black tie, jacket, and pants.
Massie was on conditional release after serving five years and four months for attempted robbery in the first degree, a spokesman for the state Division of Parole, Scott Steinhardt, said. Massie was released from the Franklin Correctional Facility at Malone on August 23, exactly one year short of his maximum sentence.
Of the 4,803 state parolees on conditional release through August of this year, 1,412 violated the terms of their release, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.
State records show Massie to be 41 years of age, though the police department identified him yesterday as 39. Massie was using the alias Shawn Kemp, according to police and parole officials. The real Shawn Kemp was a player in the National Basketball Association.
In addition to his conviction, Massie has an “extensive arrest record,” Mr. Kelly said.
Massie is accused of barging into the house of Ignatis Beharry, 55, at 127th Street in Queens, and stabbing him to death at 10:39 a.m. Wednesday. The intruder stabbed Beharry multiple times in the chest and pistol-whipped the man’s 28-year-old son when he intervened to protect his father, police said. The victims were taken to Jamaica Hospital, where Beharry was pronounced dead at 11:15 a.m. His son was treated for head trauma.
The Beharry home was not Massie’s first target, according to the authorities. Massie visited the 127th Street neighborhood with the intention of committing a home robbery, but he was scared away by a dog at the first house he tried to enter, Mr. Kelly said.
Massie’s arrest evokes the notorious case of Willie Horton, a convict who was sentenced to life imprisonment for robbing and fatally stabbing a teenage gas station attendant at Lawrence, Mass., in 1974. Horton was released on a weekend furlough 12 years later and did not return. He assaulted a man the following year in Maryland and raped his fiancee. Michael Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts, supported the rehabilitative weekend-furlough program, and the resulting political fallout from attack advertisements may have cost Mr. Dukakis the 1988 presidential election.
Early release and weekend furloughs are the result of prison overcrowding, a professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Eli Silverman, said, and the failures tend to overshadow the success stories.
“We only hear the stories about these bad guys, where parole doesn’t work,” Mr. Silverman said. “They’re the only ones who make the newspapers. If people aren’t out on parole, they’re going to be in prison, and the reality is the prisons are stuffed. So we have to let some of these people out.”
Massie is expected to be arraigned today at Queens Criminal Court on charges of second-degree murder, first-degree burglary, first-degree attempted robbery, second-degree assault, and third-degree criminal possession of a weapon.
Beharry’s death was the eighth homicide this year in the 106th Precinct.