A furniture-smashing fit by a grandfather angry with his son has left his six-month-old granddaughter in a coma and clinging to life after the club head struck her in the skull. McKinley Williams is the 52-year-old grandfather who was upset with his 22-year-old son. It is unclear what the Saturday afternoon argument was regarding , but Williams was smashing furniture with a golf club to punctuate his side of it, as the younger man's wife,......

A 55-year-old man was found stabbed to death in his Prospect Heights apartment Wednesday night. Police say that Murat St. Hilaire was stabbed in the head with a corkscrew. Carline Renelique, the mother of Hilaire's three children, was worried when she didn't hear from him on Wednesday morning (they do not live together, but he called her every morning). Newsday reports that when she realized he never arrived at Wycoff Heights Medical Center, where he......

Hey, tourists, NYC may want you to spend lots of money when you visit the Big Apple, but just don't get really sick or else the Administration for Children's Services will take your kids in! Because that's what happened to one British family last month! Yvonne Bray and daughters Gemma and Katie, who live in Devon, England, were visiting New York for four days, staying at the LaGuardia Courtyard Marriott. The mother fell ill with......

Two different fires in Brooklyn and the Bronx yesterday killed four people and injured three more. Both fires occurred relatively early Saturday morning. The first was reported about 7 a.m. and was on the second floor of a two-story house in Bensonhurst. The occupants were all immigrants from Guatemala. It took firefighters almost 40 minutes to bring the blaze under control, at which point three of the residents had succumbed to smoke inhalation. Another was......

Police arrested a suspect in the shooting of 11-year-old Tyshaun Falconer as he stood in the doorway of his parents' home in Springfield Gardens, Queens. The suspect is identified as 19-year-old Michael Peterson of Elmont, Long Island. Peterson allegedly went to the Falconer home and when Tyshaun answered the door asked for his older brother Tony. When the younger brother answered that he was not home, Peterson is accused of shooting him once in the......

For some people, celebrating New Year's didn't mean drinking champagne and wearing whimsical hats: It meant trying to deliver a baby! New York City's first 2008 newborns are from Queens: Kamiyah Alina Barrow was born at midnight at New York Hospital Medical Center in Queens while Isabella Sophia Sears was born about a minute later at Elmhurst Hospital Center. Baby Kamiyah, 8 pounds and 4 ounces, was born less than an hour after her parents......

It was an ordinary Sunday night in Springfield Gardens, Queens, but it turned violent when an 11-year-old boy was shot after answering the door. The father the victim, Tyshaun Falconer, says his son told him, "Daddy, I think I got shot." Tyshaun, a student at I.S 59, had told the person at the door that his older brother, Tony Falconer Jr., was not at home right before the hooded man shot him in the chest.......

Sigh. Blocks from where a man was killed in a hit-and-run on Friday, a 65-year-old Brooklyn woman was fatally struck by a livery cab yesterday morning. The Daily News reports that Barbara Tjornhom had been headed home from church when a driver, making a right at 6th Avenue and 52nd Street in Sunset Park, hit her. Tjornhom died at Lutheran Medical Center. The driver, who stayed at the scene, was not charged, but Tjornhom's husband,......

Some disappointed Giants fans leaving the stadium in New Jersey last night were served an extra dose of indignity when the escalator from the top tier of Gate A malfunctioned and knocked people off their feet. The accounts seem as scrambled as the scrum of people sprawled at the foot of the escalator, but it seems that the bottom few steps of the stairway collapsed, with several people becoming trapped. The emergency stop button was......

The Thursday night fire in a Bedford-Stuyvsant brownstone that left a 3-year-old child in critical condition seems to have been caused by her playing with a butane lighter. There is also a tragic coincidence: In 1992, an apartment fire claimed the life of a 1-year-old sister. Gabriela Rogers, known as "Gabi," who suffered burns on 70-75% of her body, is still at New York Prebyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. She and another young sister Camilila......

When fighting a fire in Bedford-Stuyvesant, firefighter saved a three-year-old girl who was left alone in a house on Stuyvesant Avenue. The FDNY responded at 7:23PM and heard the girl's cries coming from the rear of the house. An FDNY spokesman explained to the NY Times, "The fire was between them and the girl. Normally they would pull the door to the fire room closed, but there was no door to pull closed, so they......

Earlier this morning, an MTA bus collided with a school van transporting children in Fresh Meadows, Queens. Details of the accident are thin, but initial reports say that up to 9 people are injured, most of which are children. The collision occurred just after 8 a.m. when the Q46 bus struck the van. The FDNY says that two critically injured children were sent to Long Island Jewish Hospital with one other child. Three other children......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a severed limb on 55th St. in Brooklyn, a person fatally struck by a train near the East Tremont Station on the 2 line in the Bronx, and an armed robbery on Bradhurst and 147th St. in Manhattan. A mother brought her 15-year-old son to the hospital when she discovered him assembling what appeared to be a bomb in their home. The ER at Hoboken University Medical Center was......

Anders Uwadinobi, a freshman from the Bronx, was "play" fighting with a friend in a dorm room at SUNY Binghamton when he suffered fatal injuries Sunday night. An autopsy is being conducted, but a student who witnessed the situation when he heard screams to call 911 said he saw Uwadinobi "shaking" and seizing. The 18-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival at Wilson Memorial Regional Medical Center. The student told the Post, "They were playing around.......

The second 911 call between police shooting victim Khiel Coppin's mother and a 911 operator seems to suggests some misinformation. Coppin's mother Denise Owens claimed she told the 911 operator who called her back that her son did not have a gun. Here's an excerpt (you can read the transcript here and hear it here) of the call at 7:05PM, 14 minutes before police shot at 18-year-old Coppin 20 times: Female: Hello Operator: Hi Maam......

The health scare of the season continued this week with news of an outbreak of the methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) "superbug" at an Upper East Side hospital's children's ward. The New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center said that nine infants were infected with the drug-resistant strain of bacteria that killed a New York 7th Grader last month. Omar Rivera Jr. was felled by the staph infection on October 14th after being misdiagnosed at Kings County......

Halloween tricks are never a good idea, no matter what side of the law you're on. A 14-year-old boy was throwing eggs at cars in Staten Island when two police officers decided to teach him a lesson. Police sources S.tell the Daily News that Officers Thomas Elliassen and Michael Danese picked up Rayshawn Moreno around 8:30PM, drove him to "a swampy area of the 122nd Precinct" and then "dropped him off wearing only boxer shorts......

A city employee moonlighting as a bouncer at The Bronx Cocktail was killed by a man angry that it was past last call. Raymond Barnett, 38, was killed when the man fired a gun into the bar around 5AM yesterday. Barnett worked for the city's Department of Design and Construction as the head of fleet management, but had taken the job at the bar to help out with bills. He had been closing up when......

Yesterday morning, two men riding bicycles were killed in separate accidents. Both occurred in Brooklyn. Around 4AM, the a 26-year-old at Union Avenue and Ten Eyck Street in East Williamsburg was hit by an oil truck. WABC reported that he was cycling in the wrong direction. The cyclist, identified as Craig Murphy [sic] who is a member of RightRides, died at the scene. The truck driver was not charged. Then, in Bedford Stuyvesant, around 6AM,......

Who can blame the staff at Palisades Medical Center for being excited when George Clooney and his girlfriend were admitted, after the couple got into a motorcycle accident in Weehawken, NJ? But it seems that twenty-seven staffers were so excited that they accessed Clooney's personal and confidential information and may have leaked it to the media. WCBS 2 reported that at least 40 employees (doctors, nurses, etc.) were investigated and 27 were suspended, some for......

A homeless man is in the burn unit of Cornell Medical Center after being viciously attacked by a group of teens. Police say that the victim was sleeping outside the Iglasia Christiana Betania on East 103rd Street when the teens "threw a gasoline-soaked towel on him." The victim was found after midnight, and residents said they "recognized him as a homeless man who often sought food and shelter at the church." One told WNBC, "He'd......

A 62-year-old woman was attacked in her Gerritsen Beach home when two masked men pushed their way in. WNBC 4 reports that the woman's husband ran downstairs to help fight off the attackers, who fled and left the scene in a black Jeep. According to WABC 7, the woman had been letting her cats back inside the house around 10PM when the men approached her. One of the men may have been armed with a......

Rugged celebrity George Clooney and his girlfriend were injured when their motorcycle got into an accident with a car in Weehawken, NJ yesterday afternoon. Clooney, whose has been filming the Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading in New York and New Jersey, has a hairline fracture of a rib and road rash while Sarah Larson has broken some of her toes. Both were wearing helmets. Clooney's spokesman Stan Rosenfeld said, "George said he was driving......

Yesterday afternoon, a tractor-trailer dangled from the side of the Staten Island Expressway. Authorities believe the driver, James Christian of North Carolina, may have lost control of the rig when another car stopped short. The tractor-trailer fell off the SIE onto South Avenue - hitting the front of 61-year-old Jenetta Christopherson's car. Christopherson, who was driving with her baby granddaughter, said she was lucky she braked when she heard a loud noise above her, "If......

An argument escalated into arson and then a murder-suicide, all in front of a small child, in Borough Park early yesterday morning. After setting their apartment on fire, police say that Christopher Flynn shot his girlfriend Christina Scarabaggio and then turned the gun on himself. Scarabaggio's 4-year-old daughter Bianca Perez was found crying over her mother's body outside. Flynn, who had a history of drug arrests, and Scarabaggio, a nursing student, had been dating for......

The relatively small health clinic that released the most widely quoted and alarming study about the adverse health impacts of exposure to the World Trade Center environment may have reached its conclusions with weak data and presented its findings in a questionable manner. The New York Times examined the work done at the Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a health clinic associated with Mount Sinai Medical Center and that included......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting at West 138th St. and Broadway in Manhattan, a triple shooting on Hunter Ave. in the Bronx, and a bomb threat at the intersection of Prospect and 5th Aves. in Brooklyn. Residents of Starrett City received a letter from the housing complex's owners that they intend to opt out of the state's subsidized housing program. One third of the 6,000 apartments at Starrett City are subsidized and......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a large sinkhole on Nostrand Ave. and Quincy St. in Brooklyn, a large fight on Park Ave. and 129th St. in Manhattan, and a water rescue at the St. George Ferry Terminal on Staten Island. The Daily Show is giving the green screen that is used to fake remote segments a rest and actually sending correspondent Rob Riggle to Iraq to file reports for the satircal news show. This......

The short, sad life of Hailey Gonzalez ended yesterday when hospital staff at Richmond University Medical Center on Staten Island removed the 21-month-old from life support. Gonzalez had been in the hospital since last Thursday, when the police discovered that her mother and her mother's boyfriend had thrown her against a playpen and beaten her near the point of death. The couple had waited hours before calling 911, as Hailey foamed from the mouth and......

Last night, a woman was killed outside her Staten Island home. The victim, in her 40s, lived at 29 Newark Avenue in the Port Richmond section and was shot multiple times in her back. Her 26-year-old son was also shot in the stomach, and police believe he was trying to protect his mother. One of the victim's relatives found the victim and her son laying on the ground. He told the Post he called 911......