'NYPD 24/7': Who Stabbed Shawna Kunkel?
June 22, 2004 -- Looks can be deceiving. Any cop working in New York knows that.
That's why Steve Di Schiavi, a homicide detective with the New York Police Department, is suspicious of the clean-cut guy in the expensive blue suit who could have a motive in the stabbing incident he's investigating.
According to what an Emergency Service Unit worker believes he heard the victim say, police think he could be the one who plunged a knife into her chest, just inside the entryway to his upscale apartment building on East 13th Street in Manhattan. As the victim, 26-year-old Shawna Kunkel, was rushed into surgery, her former boyfriend sits distraught in the front passenger seat of Di Schiavi's black Chevy Malibu.
But he adamantly denies he was there at the time of the attack.
In the interrogation room at the 9th Precinct, the man tells detectives he and Kunkel were supposed to meet at 9 p.m. at a local movie theater, but she never arrived.
Frustrated, he returned to his apartment, where he was stunned to find the police knocking on his neighbors' doors, searching for clues as to who assaulted his ex-girlfriend.
As Di Schiavi starts talking to the former boyfriend, he realizes the man's clothes are too clean. There was blood all over the hallway, yet none on his suit. He couldn't have stabbed Kunkel.
Drawing on his 20 years of experience as a cop, Di Schiavi hypothesizes to the shaken man sitting across the table that it could just have been a robbery gone badly.
"You know, we see a lot of crazy s--t in this city," he says.
As the man is cleared, Di Schiavi knows it's not going to be easy to catch the assailant. It never is.
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