A 32-year-old woman was arrested on Thursday and accused of killing her 5-year-old daughter inside their home in Queens this week, according to the police and a family member.
The woman, identified by the police as Francis Cabello, was taken into custody shortly after 5 p.m. on Thursday, about 24 hours after police officers arrived at their home in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens and found the young girl unconscious. The child, Fabiana Cabello, was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center on Wednesday night, where she was pronounced dead.
Ms. Cabello was booked on a charge of murder on Thursday, the police said. Information about her arraignment was not yet available on Friday morning, and a lawyer for her could not be immediately identified.
It was not clear what had taken place in Ms. Cabello’s home in the hours before officers arrived on Wednesday. But the events spilled into view just before 7 p.m. when officers received an unusual 911 call reporting an assault at her address.
The caller, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the episode, was Ms. Cabello. When a dispatcher answered the phone Ms. Cabello told them, “I killed my daughter,” according to a police complaint report, the official said.
Officers responding to the call arrived at the beige-colored two-story home at 6:55 p.m. on Wednesday. There, they found the girl unresponsive and bleeding from her nose, the official said. She was taken by emergency medical workers to the nearby hospital in critical condition and was later pronounced dead.
Punraj Singh, Ms. Cabello’s uncle, said in an interview that he saw a row of police cars outside the family home when he returned from work on Wednesday. Mr. Singh, who lives on the first floor of the house in the unit below Ms. Cabello and Fabiana, said a police officer then rushed out of the house with Fabiana unconscious in his arms. Officers escorted Ms. Cabello out after that, he said.
Reached by phone on Friday, Mr. Singh said his family was “very pained” at the loss of a 5-year-old girl who he described as “so loving and joyful.”
Mr. Singh said he had been very close with Fabiana. Multiple times a week, she would come downstairs to the apartment he shares with his mother and he would cook her small feasts of her favorite Indian delicacies — fried fish, dal puri, roti, curry.
Though Fabiana came to visit frequently, Mr. Singh said he did not know what took place in Ms. Cabello’s apartment upstairs and that he was not aware of any signs of trouble before the death this week.He said he was not sure if Ms. Cabello had struggled with mental health.
The city’s child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, declined to say whether Ms. Cabello had any history with the agency, citing state confidentiality law. (There are exceptions to the law that allow disclosure in some cases when a child has died; A.C.S. would not immediately say whether any of those exceptions apply in this case.) The chief medical examiner’s office will investigate Fabiana’s exact cause and manner of death, the police said.
On Friday, A.C.S. said it was “investigating this tragedy” with the police department.
Reflecting on the death on Friday, Mr. Singh said Fabiana had been a light in his family and their home.
He recalled the ways she looked after his mother, her great-grandmother, taking her hand and helping her around the apartment when her knees hurt. She was so friendly, he said, that the family had to remind her not to talk to strangers. Once, during a doctor’s appointment, she hugged all the nurses she could see, he said.
“Nobody would want to lose her,” Mr. Singh said. “She was such a beautiful child.”
Andy Newman contributed reporting.
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