An eight-year NYPD veteran is suspended without pay after a violent dispute with her girlfriend Monday morning in their Harlem apartment. Police sources tell the tabloids that the fight started around 3:15 a.m. when Officer Ekeythia Dunston, 32, received a text message from another woman. Dunston, who works out of the 108th Precinct in Long Island City, had just returned home with her 42-year-old partner, Erica LeGall, from a booze cruise.
When LeGall saw the text come in, she allegedly went postal, grabbing a clothes iron and hitting Dunston across her skull, leaving a "tennis-ball-sized welt" on her head, a source tells the Daily News. Then Dunston produced a pistol; a neighbor tells the News she heard these shouts: "No! No! No! Don't shoot!" Polices say Dunston fired twice, striking LeGall once in the thigh and once in her shoulder. Their two sons—Jayleen, 7, who is LeGall's, and Daichoi, 13, who is Dunston's—were asleep in their room and were unharmed, as was their babysitter.
LeGall was taken to Harlem Hospital, where she's listed in critical but stable condition. She's charged with assault and endangering the welfare of a child. Dunston, who the Post points out happens to be the niece of former Met Shawon Dunston, was treated for her head injury at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Columbia. She was arrested and charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child. Meanwhile, the city's Administration for Children's Services has taken the boys into their care.
