The father of one of the Carnegie Deli massacre victims yesterday called his son’s killers “cowards” who should “pay big time” when the NYPD tracks them down.
Stephen King, 32, an aspiring rock musician at work on a second modern-rock CD, was visiting Jennifer Stahl’s sixth-floor apartment last Thursday when two gunmen robbed her marijuana stash, killing her, King, and a third person, and wounding two other people.
“My son was a very unique person with a heck of a lot to contribute and for him to be snuffed out by assassins’ bullets just destroys everything we know about human beings,” said Philip King, a professor at the University of San Francisco. He said his son’s killer should get the death penalty.
Stephen, his only son, sometimes visited Stahl’s Seventh Avenue apartment to use her musical and recording equipment to make his CD. She let Stephen, who had studied at Juilliard, use her equipment in exchange for feeding her cats.
Like many musicians, Stephen had a day job. His was as an assistant manager of the Top of the One Athletic Club in Times Square.
“My son was also a championship body builder who definitely could have handled anyone with a knife, but not a 9mm gun and a bullet in the back of the head,” King said. “It was a cowardly act, binding people with duct tape and doing this kind of violence.”
Philip King turns 60 Saturday. His son would have been 33 on Friday. Stephen planned to fly to San Francisco to celebrate their birthdays together. And he was carrying a secret to announce – his engagement.
The elder King said he was in Tampa, Fla., caring for his own ailing father when he received the news of his son’s death.
“I just felt like everything was caving in on me. I just could not picture someone like Stephen being shot, and shot the way he was.”
Before leaving New York, Philip King walked by the Carnegie Deli to be near the place of his son’s death.
“I still have not accepted that I will never see him again,” King said.
He asked anyone interested in helping reduce gun violence to purchase his son’s first CD, “In and of Itself,” on amazon.com. All proceeds will go to an anti-gun-violence education fund, he said.