Cops charge dad with murdering 8-year-old son

Boujeke Kenmoe and his son Jerry

A Queens dad was charged on Monday with murdering his 8-year-old son before trying to commit suicide, police said.
Boujeke Kenmoe, 41, was found with cuts on his wrist, lying on a bed in his apartment in a four-family building on Underhill Avenue in Flushing. A two-gallon bucket filled with blood was in the bathroom, along with the child’s bloody clothes, the sources said.
Cops believe the blood in the bucket and on the clothing came from the man’s self-inflicted wounds.

The boy, identified by friends and neighbors as Jerry, was found lying on another bed. There were signs of trauma on his neck, the sources said.

Kenmoe is charged with murder and awaiting arraignment at Queens Criminal Court.
When EMS medics arrived at the home, the dad told them he had strangled his son that morning.
“Oh my God, oh my God, not them!” neighbor James Lana, 75, said upon hearing the news. “I never would have guessed it was him. That guy seems so normal!”
Lana said he would see the seemingly affectionate father walking Jerry to school each morning as the boy clung tightly to his little red backpack.
“The kid always looking up at his dad, like lovingly admiring his dad,” Lana added. “You know, proud, while he tried to keep up.”
Cops rushed to the scene shortly after 10 p.m. after a woman called 911 and said a man was inside his apartment, had been taking pills and was trying to kill himself, the sources said.
She said she was concerned about the youngster.
The identity of the caller was not immediately clear.
The man’s wife was not home when cops arrived.
“I was in the yard and I heard one long, bloodcurdling scream,” said Lana’s live-in girlfriend, Eleanor Balha, 76.
“It didn’t sound like a man or a woman, it sounded like a child,” she added.
“The mother I never saw, my neighbor said the mom would come and go, a day or two a week she was here. But he was always there.”
Police were looking for her so they could break the tragic news.
“He was a very happy kid,” said another neighbor of the little boy.
The dad is an immigrant from Africa, the neighbor said, adding, “He’s a good guy, always ready to help people.”
What happened, the neighbor said, “is hard to imagine. I would never have seen this coming.”
Another neighbor, Abed Islam, said the couple often had “very loud disagreements.’’
Their arguments, he said, “were verbal, very loud.’’
The wife had left the home for a while, he said, and they attempted to reconcile when she returned.
“They tried to patch things up but it was still stormy in terms of their relationship,” Islam said.
“They got into a lot of fights.”
He said the man had confided to him that his wife “had a plan to split the family apart so she could leave.’’
The dad was initially treated at Queens General Hospital.
The mother works at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, according to neighbors.
Additional reporting by Kenneth Garger and Antonio Antenucci