Daughter finds mom stabbed dead in Brooklyn home days after birthday

The heartbroken daughter of a Brooklyn mother of six, after a family birthday celebration this past weekend, was left planning for a funeral after finding her corpse inside a blood-spattered apartment.

The death of Latanya Parker, 58, was ruled a homicide Wednesday, one day after she was found dead inside her Bedford-Stuyvesant home by the worried daughter.

The family had gathered at Shymecca Parker’s home in East New York on Saturday for the victim’s joy-filled birthday celebration.

“She died in her birthday outfit,” said the 38-year-old daughter, the oldest of the victim’s children. “She didn’t even get a chance to take it off. … She was slumped on the wall, down on the floor. I never expected to have seen that. I was in shock all day.”

Shymecca arrived at about 3:15 p.m. Tuesday to find the sixth-floor apartment on Fulton St. near Lewis Ave. in shambles, with blood inside the bedroom and splashed from the kitchen to the front door once she used a spare key to go inside.

“When they took the body out, from what I saw, it looks like she put up a fight,” she said. “It’s not like she just sat down and got stabbed. … She was sweet, she was nice. She was a fighter. To know she sat there and suffered, that’s a horrible way to die.”

Parker recalled speaking with her mother around 2 a.m. Sunday when the victim returned home after the party and said a Facebook Live video later recovered from the mom’s phone showed a man inside the apartment with Latanya.

“On the live stream … my mother said, ‘If anything happens to me, y’all know,’” recounted the daughter, describing the man as a person of interest in the case. “Then you hear his voice saying ‘Don’t say that, don’t do that.’ I met him, I know him.”

Cops have made no arrests.

Next-door neighbor Mary Thompson, 72, recounted the sad scene after Shymecca arrived at her mother’s home to find the corpse.

“I heard her daughter screaming,” recounted Thompson. “She said, ‘My mom is dead!’ I was shocked. … Whoever did this has to be punished. The Bible said thou shall not kill.”

The victim was stabbed and slashed in the chest and suffered a deep puncture wound to the waist, police said. The NYPD has established no motive yet in the killing.

The victim’s oldest daughter said she returned to the mother’s residence after a call to her parent’s cell phone was answered by a stranger who found the device on the street.

“They figured maybe she lost her phone, so the older daughter came to check in and that’s when she found her,” said neighbor Tawny Smalls, 52. “I would never think of anyone who would attack her. That would be the last thing I think.”

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The victim’s youngest child was a 12-year-old girl, with Shymecca the oldest of her five daughters and a son. The youngest daughter happened to be staying with her dad when her mother was killed.

“We would always say hello to each other,” said Thompson, a nine-year building resident. “I saw her take her kid to school. … The little girl is so sweet. I’m shook up, I’m nervous, I’m shocked. I’m very much afraid because I don’t know what happened.”

Smalls recalled hearing the eldest daughter screaming and crying in the hallway.

“You hear about it on the news, but if it’s someone you know and close to you and then it happens, you’re just like, ‘What?’” said Smalls. “She was doing real good, raising her kids. She overcame a lot of obstacles in her life, and for this to happen, it’s sad.”

The victim’s family was left preparing for a funeral remembering their matriarch as they came to grips with her sudden violent demise.

“I thought she was going to die from old age,” said Shymecca. “I think if I had just walked in, and she, like, died of a heart attack, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But she was murdered.”

Originally Published: Aug 23, 2023 at 8:23 am