Oct 2, 2026
4 min read
A 31-year-old woman was viciously stabbed to death by her boyfriend inside their Queens apartment Wednesday before he climbed to the roof and plunged from the seven-story building, police and sources said.
Pheona Premraji was found slashed in the face, neck and across her body, allegedly at the hands of her 32-year-old boyfriend, shortly before noon inside the second-floor unit on Neilson Street near Dinsmore Avenue in Far Rockaway, authorities said.
The murder weapon was found discarded next to her, according to sources.
Shortly after the murder, the alleged killer climbed to the roof of the building and appeared ready to jump, witnesses said.
Panicked neighbours pleaded with him to come down, with some calling out to him in Spanish.
“When the cops came, they came flooding in kind of hot,” witness Moise Guerrier, who lived on the sixth floor, told The Post. “Then, he went from laying down only [on the edge of the 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.”
Police found his bloodied, crumpled body with slash wounds to his wrists, ankles and torso. He was rushed by police to Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital in critical condition, law enforcement sources said.
The boyfriend remained in hospital and had not been charged by Thursday afternoon.
It was not immediately clear how he sustained the slash wounds.
The dramatic plunge ultimately led the NYPD to discover Premraji’s body after the building superintendent told police the jumper lived on the second floor, according to sources.
Her 69-year-old uncle, who identified himself as Harry, said his niece had been dating her alleged killer for about six years and claimed that her boyfriend had been abusive.
“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].”
A second-floor neighbour said it appeared the boyfriend wanted Premraji to leave the apartment.
“They fought, I knew because they would call the cops and the cops would be here,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified. “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 added. “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.’”
“It’s been over a year, ’cause the real bad fighting stories [were from] about a year ago,” the resident said. “But he asked her to leave almost three years ago.”
A sixth-floor resident said the couple was “always fighting,” adding, “It’s disgusting what he did to his [girlfriend].”
The alleged killer had four reported domestic disputes, including two involving Premraji, sources said.
On April 5, he allegedly threw Premraji’s computer on the floor, and she then tossed his phone, according to sources.
Police were also called on Christmas Eve in 2020 when the two got into a heated fight about their relationship, sources said.
Sources also said police were called when the man allegedly punched his female cousin in the mouth and knocked out one of her teeth.
Despite her domestic troubles, Premraji always made time for her family, according to her cousin, Akbar Khan, 47.
“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 said he last spoke to his cousin just “a few days ago.”
“We spoke about ‘summer’s over’ and stuff like that – what we’re gonna do next summer,” he explained.
Premraji was particularly close with her father, who brought her from Guyana to the US as a child, according to Khan.
“Every week she’d go visit her father, spend time with her father, then come back to her place where she lives,” he 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,” Khan added.
“But somebody who’d do this to her is really terrible.” (New York Post)
