Investigators on 158th Avenue in Howard Beach, Queens, where Raymond Sheehan, a former police sergeant, was killed.
A retired New York police sergeant was shot to death by his wife Monday morning during a domestic dispute at their home in Howard Beach, Queens, the police said.
Investigators said that the retired sergeant, Raymond Sheehan, 48, was shot between 11:30 a.m. and noon, but that the police were not notified until 12:52 p.m. Mr. Sheehan’s wife, Barbara, 46, called her sister after the shooting; the sister came to the house, at 99-08 158th Avenue, and then dialed 911, a police spokesman said.
Officers found Mr. Sheehan dead in an upstairs bedroom, shot several times, the police said. The police said that Ms. Sheehan shot her husband with a gun that belonged to him. Two handguns — a 9-millimeter pistol and a .38-caliber revolver — were recovered from the house. Law enforcement officials said that Ms. Sheehan had a “fresh facial injury” when they arrived.
On Monday evening, investigators questioned Ms. Sheehan at the 106th Precinct station house in neighboring Ozone Park, and then charged her with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon. Afterward, she was taken to a hospital following a report of chest pains, a fire official said. A police official said that the couple had no history of domestic violence reports.
Earlier, a team of detectives could be seen walking in and out of the Sheehans’ off-white clapboard home, set in a residential section of Howard Beach, not far from Kennedy Airport. For hours, investigators cordoned off 158th Avenue between 99th and 100th Streets, as they collected evidence from inside the house and interviewed neighbors.
Mr. Sheehan retired from the Police Department in April 2002, after 20 years on the force, the police spokesman said. He spent most of his career with the crime-scene unit, which is based in Jamaica, Queens.
Several neighbors said the Sheehans had two college-aged children — a son and a daughter. The family had lived in the house for at least 10 years, said neighbors, none of whom said they could recall ever hearing the couple fight.
“I never saw or heard anything out of the ordinary coming from the house; no arguing, no screaming, nothing that made us think they weren’t getting along,” said one neighbor of the Sheehans who would not give his name. “I’m totally surprised that this happened to them.”
Another neighbor, Lynn Campisi, said that the Sheehans were “very nice people, very involved in the church.”
The police said that no one else seemed to have been in the house at the time of the dispute.
