A man who stabbed his wife in the stomach attacked her spouse during an International Women’s Day party in Queens before being shot and killed by police, relatives told the Post.
Amira Nematov was “in great pain” on Saturday, said a relative who spoke at the woman’s hospital bedside.
“She’s at her limit. She’s just saying, ‘It hurts,’ that’s all.”
Friday night’s horror in Forest Hills occurred among close family and friends who had gathered to celebrate the holiday, a significant day for the family’s native Uzbekistan and other former Soviet states.
Her husband, Jamshed Nematov, “is not feeling well,” said the relative, who did not want to give his name.
“He was hallucinating. He might have been depressed. Mental health. … Something was going on in his head.”
The 46-year-old man’s apparent difficulties include significant physical pain from his hernia, which has made him unable to work as a home health aide, but his mental problems began a month ago and Relatives said he had problems such as “seeing things he couldn’t see.” He is “out there” and “having a strange conversation with himself.”
“He needed treatment, but he didn’t want to go to the doctor,” lamented a relative. “Amira was worried about him. Even after everything that happened, she was worried about her husband and kept asking, ‘How is her husband doing?'”
Authorities said New York City police officers responding to a 911 call about a stabbing shot and killed Nematov when he refused to drop the knife.
The wife (43) does not yet know that her husband has passed away. She has had one surgery at Elmhurst Medical Center and may need more. The couple had four children.
“They have been married for over 20 years. They had a beautiful married life. They were very happy. I don’t know how this happened,” said a relative.
“I appeared when everything was already happening,” the distraught family member said in Russian.
“…There were bloodstains in the hallway. They were trying to revive him. I wanted to stop by and say Happy March 8th and give Amira some flowers, but I couldn’t make it in time.”
Longtime neighbors told the Post they had never heard the couple fight until recently.
But just before the stabbing on the second floor of a 62nd Street building just before 7 p.m., when officers tried to stop Nematov, they heard screams and gunfire, and authorities said Nematov was carrying a gun. He said he refused to drop the 12-inch knife.
“I heard a lot of arguing and yelling,” neighbor Marcela Rueda told the Post on Saturday.
“I heard kids coming and going in the hallway, and then there was silence for a little while, maybe a minute or two, and then I heard four gunshots,” she said.
“It was really scary. [The gunshots] They were really, really loud,” she added.
Police said there was some kind of struggle. Hours before her stabbing, her wife called her brother and confided that her husband and she were “having a problem,” she told the newspaper.
Police ordered Nematov, whose identity has not been released, to “drop the knife,” but he refused and “charged” at them with the weapon, police said. One of the officers, a sergeant, then fired his Taser, and two officers fired their weapons at least four times, hitting the suspect.
Rueda, a neighbor, said she has watched the couple’s four children grow up: two daughters, ages 23 and 20, and two sons, ages 17 and 14.
“I’ve heard a lot of arguments from other families on this floor, but not from this family. Like last week, I may have heard some arguments, but… [for the first time] But that’s all I heard, nothing out of the ordinary,” she said.
“They’re a really nice family and very polite. The girls always greeted us.”
Now the couple’s children will have to pick up the pieces, relatives said.
“No children were hurt, but this must be addressed,” they said.
