An off-duty police officer gunned down his wife on a Queens street last night before turning the weapon on himself, all because she didn’t cook dinner, according to law- enforcement sources.
Sherlon Smikle, 33, chased his wife, an NYPD school-safety agent, down the block outside their St. Albans home at about 7 p.m., then blasted her four times with a shotgun, the sources said. Her name was not immediately released.
The eight-year NYPD veteran then went back into his Camden Avenue house and fatally shot himself, according to the sources.
Smikle flew off the handle when his wife came home late from work and didn’t cook dinner, a source said.
A neighbor recounted the grisly chain of events.
“We heard four shots and then a pause and then there were two more,” said neighbor Andrea Tatum, who called 911.
Tatum then ran outside to the spot where Smikle shot his 46-year-old wife in her school-safety uniform.
“I saw the woman who got shot face down on the street. She wasn’t moving at all,” Tatum said.
“I couldn’t see any blood but I saw the shell casings. Four that I could see right there.”
The woman was rushed to Queens General Hospital, where she died.
The officer, previously assigned to the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn, had his police-issued weapon taken away last month after a domestic dispute involving his wife, sources said.
A source said last night that police were investigating how the cop got his hands on the shotgun.
Smikle was transferred last month from the 83rd Precinct to the Housing Bureau, where he worked a post watching surveillance video from city housing projects, a law-enforcement source said.
His wife worked as a school-safety agent in a Queens Village public school in the 105th Precinct.
A source said the couple had recently purchased a new home outside the country.
The couple’s 8-year-old child was not home at the time of the slaying and suicide.
Police later found the child unharmed at a relative’s house in the neighborhood.