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Three people found dead in a grisly scene at a Queens home were dead for several days before a family member found the bodies.
Relatives identified the dead as Karleen Barnett, 55, her 35-year-old son Dervon Brightly, and family friend Varshana “Brittany” Malcolm, 22, according to the New York Daily News.
Police found the 22-year-old’s body, with her hands bound together and tape over her mouth, stabbed to death on a bed upstairs, as CrimeOnline previously reported.
“She’s a family friend from Jamaica, just visiting,” Barnett’s nephew told the Daily News. “We’ve known her for years.”
Investigators found a locked basement door when they arrived, and Barnett and Brightly’s bodies behind it when they broke through. All three victims had been stabbed; Brightly was also hit in the head.
The nephew said Barnett’s other son, who also lives at the address but had been away, returned home and found the gruesome scene. That son was initially taken into custody for questioning but released when police realized he wasn’t involved in the murders.
A police source told the Daily News the victims had been dead “for at least three days.”
Neighbors and friends were shocked at the deaths in a family they described as “good” and “quiet.”
“It was extremely shocking for us to hear they were murdered gruesomely like that, viciously,” neighbor Shaun Buchanan told The New York Post. “That’s what’s driving us crazy. That these people died like that.”
“We went through everything together. It was him and two other friends, and we called ourselves the Four Horsemen. We did everything together,” Nate Richardson, a close friend of Brightly, told The Post.
[Featured image: Dervon Brightly, one of the victims of the triple murder/Facebook]
