The 911 calls came in Friday night, Oct. 23, reporting a home invasion and a stabbing at a house on 149th Street in southeast Queens. By the time it was over, at least three men had been stabbed, a woman had been shot by a police officer, and the NYPD and the woman’s family were telling very different stories about the last few seconds.
On Saturday, the NYPD arrested Rashaun Donovan, 48, of Queens, according to CBS New York. NBC New York spelled his first name Rashawn. He is charged with two counts of attempted murder, four counts of assault and one count of criminal possession of a weapon. The charges are allegations. Donovan is presumed innocent, and no information about an arraignment or plea had been made public as of Tuesday morning, Oct. 27. The case will be handled by the Queens District Attorney’s Office.
What police say
NYPD Chief of Patrol Philip Rivera described the encounter at an early-morning news conference Saturday. When officers arrived just before 9:45 p.m., he said, “a female appeared at the third floor window on the side of the house and said that she couldn’t come downstairs and threw a set of keys out the window.” Officers used the keys to get inside and went up to a third-floor attic bedroom.
“There was one male sitting on the floor, a second male on top of him, and a woman who was on top both of them,” Rivera said. Officers ordered everyone to separate and raise their hands. The two men complied, he said, but the woman did not. “The female pointed with her left hand at one of the males across the room but did not raise her right hand,” Rivera said. “The officers continued to issue the same verbal commands. The female still did not comply and moved in the direction of the officers with a knife in her hand.”
An officer fired. An NYPD official told ABC7 that she “was within several feet of the officers” and that “there was no physical description of a perpetrator provided to the officers via radio.” Two knives were recovered. The woman was taken to Jamaica Hospital, where, police said, doctors found she had also been stabbed. She is in stable condition.
The department also said it has no reason to believe the woman was responsible for the reported home invasion or the first stabbing. The whole encounter was recorded on body-worn cameras, and the NYPD’s Force Investigation Division is reviewing the shooting.
What the family says
Edward Grant, 39, who identified the woman as his girlfriend of more than a decade, gave a sharply different account to NBC New York, CBS and ABC7. He described a domestic crisis, not a break-in: “It wasn’t a home invasion,” he told CBS. He said his girlfriend’s brother was having a mental-health episode and attacked people in the house with two knives.
A 23-year-old nephew, Koran Davis, told ABC7 he was asleep when his uncle came through his bedroom door with two knives and stabbed him; Grant said he found Davis bleeding from a cut on his shoulder. Grant said he and his girlfriend retreated to the attic, where she called 911 and pepper-sprayed the attacker after he broke through their door. Grant was stabbed in the arm while trying to restrain him, and he said his girlfriend pulled one of the knives out of the man’s hand. About 30 seconds later, he told ABC7, officers came in. She was in a small corner, he said, and had to step over him to get to the floor.
“I don’t think she realized she still had the knife in her hand,” Grant said. “They didn’t give her a chance to drop the knife.” He estimated the encounter lasted about 10 seconds before shots were fired, and he disputes that she was advancing on officers. He said she was shot twice in the stomach and then tased while on the floor. “She was the one that called y’all,” he told NBC.
On Saturday, police did not say whether Donovan was the uncle relatives described, though Davis has since named Donovan to ABC7 as the man who stabbed him. Davis called the police response “excessive,” while allowing that “officers have to act in a situation very, very fast.” The accounts also differ on whether he lived at the house. NBC reported that he does; Grant told CBS that the attacker was visiting. ABC7 reported that authorities counted four people stabbed, including the woman. Earlier reports placed the house in South Ozone Park; later reports put it in Jamaica.
The read
Two separate cases now come from one night.
The first is the prosecution of Donovan, which will turn on evidence the public has not seen: the victims’ testimony, the 911 calls, the knives and the body-camera footage. Nothing reported so far establishes his guilt, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence.
The second is the shooting review, and the footage will matter most. The NYPD’s account and the family’s account may not be as far apart as they first appear. Officers who come into an attic, after radio calls about a home invasion and a stabbing, and see a woman holding a knife who does not raise her hands have very little time to work out who is the victim. A woman who has just disarmed an attacker and is trying to get to the floor in a cramped corner may not realize what officers are seeing. Both things can be true. The question for investigators is whether the officer’s split-second judgment was reasonable given what he knew, and whether anything could have been done to slow the moment down.
The NYPD has released body-camera footage in past police shootings, and whether and when to release it here will be up to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch‘s department. Releasing it once investigators allow would do more for public trust than any news conference.
Featured image: NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch at MTA headquarters, October 2025. Photo by Marc A. Hermann / Metropolitan Transportation Authority via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
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