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A 50-year-old parolee who had been out of prison for five months was shot dead by a parole officer in Queens on Tuesday after he grabbed another officer and threatened her with a knife, the authorities said. The parolee, identified by the police as Eric van Reid, of Sunnyside, was at the State Division of Parole office at 92-36 Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica for an appointment, the authorities said. He was released from prison in November after serving 19 years for rape and burglary. He had spent more than half his life in prison. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The second suspect in the brutal December beating death of an Ecuadorean immigrant in Brooklyn did not bother to offer any denials upon his arrest on Friday morning, according to the police. ''So I killed someone,'' Keith Phoenix, 28, told New York police detectives who found him hiding in the bathroom of a Yonkers apartment, the police said. ''That makes me a bad guy?'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Four cars have caught on fire near Central Park in the past two weeks and fire officials are investigating whether the blazes may be related, the authorities said on Wednesday. Several rambling notes were left at the scenes of two of the fires; among their topics were references to being ''sexually disrespected'' and complaints about the courts, a law enforcement official said, and more than one used the phrase ''mind control.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The emergency call came in late on Thursday, a brief but urgent message from a building in the West Village: ''Female fell down air shaft.'' Firefighters raced to the Westbeth building, a rambling artists' complex on West Street. They were told the victim had fallen about 180 feet down a chimney. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]