A quiet neighbourhood in Queens, New York was rocked Wednesday after a 20-year-old man, said to be a Jamaican of unsound mind, shot dead three persons including his mother, then turned the gun on himself.

A fifth person, escaped with a minor injury after leaping out of a back window, according to an article posted on the New York Times website.

The article reported that moments before Wade Jimmy Lee Dawkins shot his mother, Sonia Taylor, 44, she called the police frantically, saying she feared for her life. But before the police arrived Dawkins murdered Taylor, her companion, Arnold Lawson, 47, who used a wheelchair after a recent stroke and his home health aide, Syndi Boye, 28, of Brooklyn. Lawson’s nephew, Maurice Johnson, 21, who was said to be visiting from Jamaica to help care for his uncle, who had also worked at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, escaped after he played dead subsequent to the gunman grazing him in the leg.

The New York Times said the killings, which began shortly after 11:40 pm appeared to have been the grim culmination of an increasingly fractious relationship between Dawkins and his mother, who called the police twice on Monday, saying that she was frightened by the degree of arguments she was having with her son.

The police, the report added, said they had responded to the call, but concluded that the arguments – one of which was about the use of a computer and a telephone – did not amount to a crime.

The article also reported that Dawkins was taken to Long Island Jewish Hospital for emotional disturbance in October, after his mother, who worked at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, called the police, saying he was throwing things around the house. Similarly, in that instance, the police said there was insufficient evidence to arrest Dawkins. Whether he was admitted to the hospital was unclear. However, the New York Times reported that Taylor, believing that her son should have been arrested, filed a complaint with the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau.

On Wednesday, Taylor’s sister Ann Taylor blasted the authorities, saying her sister had called the police seven times in recent days – the police confirm only the three – for protection against

her son.

“Nobody would get him out of the house,” Ann Taylor said tearfully. “This is ridiculous. Oh, my God.”

Ann Taylor said she learned of the deaths Wednesday afternoon when she happened to be passing by in her minivan and saw the ribbons of police tape. Through tears, she insisted that the authorities ignored her sister’s calls for help.

Taylor and Lawson’s son, Jamal, who is eight, also lived at the home, located on a tree-lined stretch of 225th Street in Cambria Heights, but was most likely at school when the shootings occurred.

Taylor and Boye were shot in the face, and their bodies fell in the living room and kitchen, three feet apart. Dawkins then went to the bedroom at the back of the first floor and shot Lawson, who was standing up at the time, in the chest and the face, the police said. He then shot Johnson, who fell back into a closet on a heap of clothes.

Dawkins then went upstairs to a front bedroom, the police said, and shot himself in the right side of

his head.