Tracy Bennett
DEADLY TRIANGLE: Joseph Kernizan (left) killed himself as police prepared to move in on the man who murdered wife Tracy Bennett and her lover Wayne Hamilton. (
)
A Haitian musician wanted for killing his wife and her beau at a Bronx motel blew his brains out as police were about to move in on his Florida hideout.
US Marshals, NYPD detectives and local police tracked Joseph Kernizan, 42, to a home in North Miami, less than a half-mile from the Miami FBI building.
As they surrounded the single-family home where Kernizan was holed up just before 11 p.m. Tuesday, officers heard three shots.
A robot sent into the home relayed back video of the gruesome scene — Kernizan, dead of a self-inflicted gun wound, with a .380 caliber semiautomatic pistol at his side and two fully loaded AK-47 rifles in a duffel bag nearby.
Relatives were not surprised he met a violent end.
“I was worried this would happen. The family is just devastated,” said Marie Kernizan, 41, who was once married to Kernizan’s brother, Jean.
“Now all we can do is pray for his soul,” she said.
Kernizan — an Elmont, LI, resident who was prominent in the Haitian music scene in New York and Miami — was wanted for the jealousy-fueled slaying of his wife, Tracy Bennett, 38, and her boyfriend, Wayne Hamilton, 50.
Kernizan shot dead Hamilton, a Milwaukee resident, outside the Holiday Motel in Eastchester early Saturday. Then he chased Bennett around the hotel building on foot.
“Please, no!” Bennett begged before her husband shot her dead as horrified witnesses watched.
Authorities believe Kernizan had stalked Bennett and Hamilton for months, and was waiting for them to get together so he could kill them both.
After Kernizan fled, members of the New York-New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force tracked him down to a friend’s apartment in North Miami, which they surrounded Tuesday night.
“I saw lines of police … ATF, North Miami police, they just lined the street. They had the whole building taped off,” said neighbor David Guillaum, 28.
Kernizan closed the shades and tried to flee out the back door. But seeing he was surrounded, he ran back and locked himself in the home, sources said.
Kernizan’s friend walked out and gave himself up 10 minutes later, leaving the gunman inside for the minutes before he killed himself.
“He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He knew no God. The devil was what he worshiped, cold-blooded murderer that he is,” said Hamilton’s aunt, Beverly Hynes, 64.
Hamilton and Kernizan “had their fights, and she realized her mistake and was trying to get out,” Hynes said.
Hamilton, who was a registered nurse, leaves behind three children, 7, 10 and 18 years old.