Police have arrested Thomas Paolino in connection with the murder of his girlfriend whose body was found in NJ's Pine Barrens yesterday. According to reports, the family of 19-year-old Jessica Tush said that Paolino had been "increasingly abusive" in recent weeks. Hikers found Tush buried in a shallow grave in the Pine Barrens, which is about 55 miles away. A NJ medical examiner determined Tush was strangled, possibly with a cord. Hours later, Paolino was......

Jessica Tush was last seen alive Wednesday at the Staten Island Mall where she works. New Jersey police officials are now confirming that the body of a young woman found in a shallow grave by hikers in the Garden State's Pine Barrens was that of the missing teenager. An initial medical examination indicates that Tush was likely strangled to death. It was originally suspected that Jessica was abducted by force from the mall, but sources......

A tragic scene unfolded in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn yesterday morning. A man fatally stabbed his wife and then a friend in their apartment. The Daily News points out these are the 9th and 10th murders "in southern Brooklyn since March 20." It's unclear what provoked Angel Valentin to attack. The News suggests he and friend Wilfredo Suarez had been fighting, and wife Iris Cuadrado had been breaking up the fight. The Post reports Cuadrado had......

The family of a possibly insane killer who butchered a doctor now wants him to be reexamined. Last week, a lawyer for David Tarloff, who killed a psychiatrist in her Upper East Side office and attacked her colleague with a variety of knives in February, mentioned his client's problems and now a motion reveals their extent. Tarloff's family believes he has stopped taking medication that stabilized him enough to be fit for trial when he......

A tip to America's Most Wanted led authorities to James Gonzalez, who police believe fatally stabbed his girlfriend and injured another woman at the East Village Key Food on February 29. Gonzalez was found in a Miami homeless shelter, and NYPD detectives are headed to Florida to bring him back to face charges. Last Friday, police had released surveillance footage in hopes someone would have information about Gonzalez's whereabouts. The NYPD also filmed a......

Images from WNBC A month ago, a man stabbed two employees of the Key Foods supermarket in the East Village, killing one and seriously injuring the other. Today, police released surveillance footage from the attack, in hopes that someone can provide information on suspect Jamie Gonzalez. The footage shows the suspect walking down the aisle, heading to the manager's booth. Some employees are seen heading towards the booth also, but he exits holding a......

Last week's LA Times article about the Tupac shooting of 1994 (occurring just two years before his murder), led to a lot of chatter about the rapper's death and those who may have been involved. The finger was now being pointed at Sean "Diddy" Combs, who maintained he was not involved. Today, The Smoking Gun calls the paper out by saying their scoop was a scam. Their main resource, James Sabatino (pictured), has likely fabricated......

Put it this way: Jared Leto should stay focused on his music career. It would be a shame if his acting aspirations distracted him from his totally boss band, 30 Seconds to Mars. Though one can see how he’d have a hard time turning down the role of Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s murderer. After all, he’s a perfect fit for the role: both Leto and Chapman are unstable, grandiose footnotes whose insecurities drive......

Leval Lyde, a 36-year-old Brooklyn rapper who went by the street name "Kevlar," was gunned down yesterday on the corner of Clinton Ave. and Fulton St. in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Lyde was shot just before 5 p.m. on the street corner and declared dead on arrival at Brooklyn Hospital. Lyde had just exited Fish & Crustaceans Quality Seafood and was walking with his sandwich towards the maroon Jaguar (owned by the mother......

David Tarloff, who is accused of slaying an Upper East Side therapist with a meat cleaver, is apparently getting some bad treatment himself on Rikers Island. Reportedly he isn't receiving his medication properly, or at all. Tarloff was arrested on February 16th, and moved from Bellevue Hospital Center to Rikers (under protective custody) on March 14th. Now his (new) court-appointed attorney, Bryan Konoski, has said, "we're extremely unhappy with the way the hospital suddenly released......

Lawyers for Natavia Lowery, the personal assistant accused of killing Linda Stein, are arguing in the press that a recently released forensics report practically exonerates their client from the crime. Police and the DA's office said that they'll wait until the trial to address the evidence, but that it was not as significant as Ron Kuby and David Pressman were describing. The forensic evidence was detailed in a report from the Office of the Chief......

A murder suspect told WCBS 2 he didn't kill real estate developer Andrew Kissel. Carlos Trujillo, who was Kissel's personal assistant-chauffeur, is being held on $1 million bail, while his cousin Leonard Trujillo was also charged with killing Kissel. In 2006, right before Kissel was to plead guilty to federal embezzling charges, movers found his stabbed body in his Greenwich mansion's basement. Kissel, who had embezzled millions from his Upper East Side co-op, faced millions......

Yesterday's fatal shooting at a Bronx sports bar was apparently prompted by an angry patron using the bathroom. While earlier reports noted that Luis Paulino fired upon the crowd at the Oasis Cafe because of an argument, the Post now reports Paulino was "furious over getting dragged out of" the men's room. According to the Post's police sources, Paulino was in the bathroom for a "very, very long time" and other patrons had knocked on......

Police netted the suspected gunman in a shootout that brought some real March madness to a Bronx sports bar Sunday night. Luis Paulino was arrested and charged with murder, attempted murder, and criminal possession of a weapon for opening fire on the patrons and staff of the Oasis Cafe, which is located on Jamaica Avenue in the Norwood neighborhood of the Bronx. Paulino reportedly was having an argument with another patron at the bar and......

A grand jury voted to indict Janet Redmond-Mercereau for the December murder of her husband. The Staten Island Advance says after keeping the police waiting for a few hours, she was accompanied by her lawyer when she turned herself in. Douglas Mercereau was a well-liked fire marshal who lived with his wife and daughters in the Oakwoodhome he grew up in. On December 4, Redmond-Mercereau, a high school teacher, had called 911 to report her......

Though the mystery has never been solved, many have attached Sean "Diddy" Combs and Christopher Wallace (Biggie Smalls/The Notorious B.I.G.) to the 1994 attack and 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur -- sparking an East Coast/West Coast rap war, leading to Biggie's 1997 murder and escalating the "no snitching" policy into law. The accusation even came from Tupac himself after the attack in 1994. Enter LA Times writer Chuck Phillips, who has been on the beat......

Saturday night, after putting out a car fire near the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, firefighters found two bodies in the trunk. The ME's office says they were victims of "homicidal violence, including blunt-force trauma of the head," before being burned. The owner of the now-burnt Porsche SUV and one of the victims was father of two Siaka Kone, the Daily News reports. Kone, a businessman from the Ivory Coast who lived in Harlem, owned a......

The construction worker who killed actress-director Adrienne Shelly in her West Village office was sentenced to 25 years in prison yesterday. Diego Pillco, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, pleaded guilty last month, and yesterday, he faced her family's sadness and rage. Shelly's mother Elaine Langbaum mentioned her young granddaughter Sophie, "The baby [Shelly] wanted for so long will never know her mother. "She will never hold her mother's hand, kiss her mother's face or feel......

The woman who is suspected of killing her fire marshal husband expects to be indicted. Grand jury proceedings will begin tomorrow, and Janet Redmond-Mercereau's attorney Mario Gallucci told WNBC, "It's a weak circumstantial case that we will fight aggressively...Janet can look forward to a long and satisfying life outside of prison." Douglas Mercereau was found dead in his Staten Island home on December 4 last year. The murder weapon was his service weapon, and he......

The man accused of killing his niece's ex-husband at a Queens playground last fall sat down for jailhouse interview and emphasized he's innocent. Mikahil Mallayev, a resident of Georgia but is now being held at Rikers, spoke to WCBS 2's Scott Weinberger. Mallayev was nabbed when police matched fingerprints on a silencer left at the scene to fingerprints already in the system. They turned out to be Mallayev's from a 1994 farebeating arrest. However, Mallayev......

If you're being arraigned for allegedly threatening the brother of the man your sister is accused of killing, should you really be yelling at the judge? That's what Natella Natanova did yesterday and she was removed from court. Natanova's sister Mazoltuv Borukhova (pictured, top) is accused of killing her ex-husband, Daniel Malakov (pictured, bottom). She and her husband were fighting over custody of their daughter (a court had awarded him temporary custody), and authorities say......

Another twist in the murder case of Queens dentist Daniel Malakov: The sister of his ex-wife - who remains in jail for plotting to kill Malakov - was arrested for threatening Malakov's brother. Natella Natanova was arrested yesterday after apparently approaching Gavriel Malakov in Queens and saying, "You do know if you talk, you will be the next to go," on Monday morning. The brother is a potential prosecution witness and Queens DA Richard Brown......

Bronx-born writer Richard Price, famous for his gritty urban novels Clockers and Freedomland, as well screenplays like The Color of Money and award-winning episodes of The Wire, has now turned his eye for detail on the turbo-gentrifying Lower East Side. Lush Life, his first novel in five years, was described by Times critic Michiko Kakutani as “a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City... no one writes better dialogue than Richard Price.” The story concerns......

The police are continuing to look for James Gonzalez, who is suspected of fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend at a grocery store as well as stabbing her co-worker. The attack occurred Friday afternoon at the East Village Key Foods location. Gonzalez, 42, who had done some part-time work at the Key Foods where he met 24-year-old Tina Negron and dated her on-and-off for a year up until a few months ago, fled the store on foot.......

Images from WNBC and WABC The police are looking for a man suspected of stabbing two Key Food employees, one of whom died at a hospital two hours after the afternoon attack. Other employees at the East Village store say James Gonzalez, a part-time maintenance worker, stabbed ex-girlfriend Tina Negron with a 10-inch knife, because he was upset over their breakup. Negron had been in the elevated manager's booth when Gonzalez apparently attacked. Bookkeeper......

Two female Key Food employees at the Avenue A and East 4th Street store were attacked by a knife-wielding man. The police originally said one of the woman died, but it turns out that one is "clinging to life" while the other is in critical condition. The Sun reports the women were in the "elevated manager's booth" when the attack took place at 3:15PM. According to WNBC, the attacker may have been a delivery......

A 29-year-old leaving his overnight shift with coworkers was fatally shot on East 39th Street yesterday morning. The incident occurred at 7:40AM, outside the Williams Club (per investigators, 1010WINS reports "the violence had nothing to do" with the 100-year-old club). Charles Ross, a Brooklyn resident, had just left the Darcel Group, a legal document company where he worked as a printer, and was heading to the subway. His friends say a man who walked up......

Three people were shot inside a popular Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn ast night. The incident occurred around 9:30PM at Tacos 2004 Viva Mexico restaurant; the victims were taken to Lutheran Medical center, where one was pronounced dead (the other two are in stable condition). Apparently two groups had been "exchang[ing] angry words" when one man took out a gun and fired. The restaurant was packed, and one witness said, "There were at least five or......

Despite some bizarre behavior during his arraignment earlier this week, David Tarloff has been found fit to stand trial for the cleaver-hacking murder of psychologist Kathryn Faughey. The initial target of Tarloff's wrath was Dr. Kent Shinbach, whose office was next door to Faughey's. Shinbach apparently had Tarloff institutionalized some years ago and the schizophrenic man had undergone electro-shock treatments. Tarloff was examined by two psychiatrists who found him "not incapacitated," meaning he can participate......

After the prison-yard murder of Larry Davis in upstate New York, most City papers noted his infamy and folk- or anti-hero status, but for the most part were content to portray him as a vicious thug, murderer, and all-around lowlife. Davis was shanked multiple times by another inmate at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster county New York. Davis was serving a 25 years-to-life sentence there for murder, even after he was acquitted of the......