Press Release

Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced today that a 30-year-old Queens resident has been sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison after being found guilty of manslaughter in February. The defendant repeatedly stabbed his female roommate in the apartment they shared in Ridgewood in September of 2016.

District Attorney Katz said, “The defendant in this case showed no mercy when he repeatedly plunged a knife into this young woman’s body. The victim’s heart was punctured along with her lung and a major artery. The defendant chose to have a non-jury trial, and after weighing all the evidence the Court found him guilty of manslaughter.”

The District Attorney’s Office identified the defendant as Render Stetson-Shanahan, 30, of Stanhope Street in the Ridgewood section of Queens. Supreme Court Justice Richard L. Buchter found the defendant guilty of manslaughter in the second degree in February and yesterday sentenced Stetson-Shanahan via Skype to 5 to 15 years in prison.

The District Attorney said that, according to trial testimony, shortly before midnight on September 28, 2016, police responded to a report of a man wearing only underwear and wandering the neighborhood with a knife. Police found the defendant at his apartment on Stanhope Street. He was in his bed and was bleeding from a self-inflicted wound to his right thigh. Police also discovered in the next room, 26-year-old Carolyn Bush. The victim was bleeding profusely from numerous stab wounds. Ms. Bush had been stabbed multiple times in her neck and torso. The puncture wounds caused massive injuries to her heart, lungs and severed an artery. Ms. Bush was taken to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Assistant District Attorney Brian C. Hughes, the former Section Chief in the District Attorney’s Homicide Bureau and current Deputy Chief of the Special Victims Bureau, prosecuted the case under the supervision of Assistant District Attorneys Brad A. Leventhal, Bureau Chief, Peter J. McCormack III, Senior Deputy Bureau Chief, John W. Kosinski and Kenneth M. Appelbaum, Deputy Bureau Chiefs, and under the overall supervision of Executive Assistant District Attorney for Major Crimes Daniel A. Saunders.