A Queens landlord slaughtered his mother-of-four tenant with a machete and then used it to kill himself yesterday after the two couldn’t resolve a rent dispute, authorities said.
“I think the devil got the best of him today,” said a friend of both killer landlord, Eulith “Sonny” Reid, and his victim, Hettie Patterson, 48.
Reid, 49 — who stopped accepting rent checks from Patterson three months ago — hacked her in the head at 11:30 a.m. in the back yard of the building on 143rd Street in South Jamaica.
He then ran to his bedroom and turned the blade on himself.
Cops found him with gashes to his neck and wrists after breaking through Reid’s barricaded door. The machete was on the floor nearby.
Reid was trying to evict Patterson, a home-health aide and grandmother, from her basement apartment so his kids could take the pad, said her boyfriend, George Frankson.
The incident came just over two months after a nasty run-in on Aug. 29, when Reid “came and asked, ‘When are you going to get your own place?’ ” Frankson recalled.
“He ran upstairs and came back with a knife, but his wife blocked him from coming back down. Then he picked up a building block and said, ‘I’m going to drop this on your head!’ ” Frankson said.
Shortly after yesterday’s bloodbath, Reid’s upstairs tenant was seen bolting from the house.
“He said he had to jump over the fence because [Reid] was after him also,” said a neighbor.