MAY 19, 1999

LIFE IN PRISON FOR QUEENS VILLAGE MAN SENTENCED IN 2 MURDERS AND 5 ATTEMPTED MURDERS

Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown today announced the sentencing of a Queens Village man in the murder of two and the attempted murder of five others on November 25, 1994.

District Attorney Brown said, "The defendant tried to slaughter everyone in his path on that day. He is an extraordinarily dangerous man who will spend the rest of his life in prison."

The defendant, Stephen Johnson, 27, of 218-79 99th Avenue, was convicted of two counts of murder in the second degree and five counts of attempted murder in the second degree after a jury trial before State Supreme Court Justice Hanophy. Judge Hanophy sentenced the defendant to 91 years to life.

According to the trial testimony, on November 25, 1994 the defendant knocked on the door of a rooming house where he and his brother had been selling crack. When Katherine Carpenter-Vines opened the door, he attacked her with an icepick stabbing her more than 50 times and then shot her at point blank range in the stomach. Going upstairs, he found Lesley Laidley playing cards with the five others. Johnson fatally shot Laidley in the head and continued firing wounding two others. Everyone else in the room jumped out the second floor window to escape.

Johnson was not taken into custody until the fall of 1996 when an anonymous phone call alerted authorities that he was in prison in Brockingham, Massachusetts on a minor drug charge. Although he fought extradition, he was returned to New York in January 1997 where he was identified by the survivors.

Assistant District Attorney Jack Warsawsky, Deputy Bureau Chief of District Attorney Brown's Homicide Trials Bureau, headed by Assistant District Attorney Daniel A. Saunders, was in charge of the prosecution.

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