Grandfather says woman accused in shootings 'harmless'

Late on the night of June 16, Marshall Williams remembers, the doorbell began ringing insistently at his Vermont Avenue house in Hempstead.

His granddaughter, Kim Wolfe, stood outside, calling to him, he said. "Grandpa, let me in, it's Kim," she said through the door to Williams.

Wolfe came in holding a gun, Williams, 88, said in an interview Friday.

"I just killed Stacie," she told her grandfather, according to Williams. Shortly before she arrived at the home, police said, Wolfe fatally shot her ex-girlfriend Stacie Williams (no relation to Marshall Williams) outside Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow.

Wolfe, 43, a correction officer, then turned the gun on her family that night, according to the Nassau County district attorney's office. Within minutes of entering his home, Williams said, she demanded her grandfather sign financial documents.

Williams said he asked his son, Marshall Williams Jr., 56, to come downstairs from his fourth-floor apartment in the same house to help with the situation. As his son tried to reason with Wolfe, she fatally shot him, and then shot her grandfather once in the right thigh, Marshall Williams said.

Wolfe then demanded her niece come with her as a hostage and fled, driving around for several hours before surrendering to Nassau police, officials said.

She didn't intend to shoot anyone, let alone her own kin, Williams said.

"She got scared," said Williams from his bed at the Townhouse Center for Rehabilitation & Nursing in Uniondale, where he was taken after being treated at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola for the gunshot wound that impeded his ability to walk. Williams, a World War II Army veteran who served in Europe and worked as a painter, has been undergoing physical therapy at the center.

Wolfe was a good-hearted person who became lost and paranoid after her father died in April, Williams said.

"I know she's harmless if she had the sense to think," he said, tears seeping from his eyes.

Wolfe pleaded not guilty July 22 to charges of two counts of second-degree murder, first-degree assault, second-degree kidnapping and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon. She is due back in court Sept. 8.

Her lawyer, Michael DerGarabedian of Rockville Centre, has said he plans to argue Wolfe was mentally deficient at the time of the shooting.

Williams said he watched Wolfe become more and more upset in the months since her father died of cancer.

"From then on, she was going backwards," he said. She would stay at Williams' house overnight several times a week, seeking comfort in her relatives instead of her own home in North Babylon, Williams said.

Wolfe spoke about how she felt everyone from house cats to co-workers was staring at her, Williams said. "She wasn't together," he said.

Wolfe brought Stacie Williams, 45, a nurse's aide in NUMC's labor and delivery suite, to her grandfather's house once, Williams said, calling Stacie Williams a "very nice person." But he was not close to Stacie Williams, and he was at a loss to explain why Wolfe might have wanted to kill her.

"She wasn't the violent type," Williams said of his granddaughter. "If she walked in right now, I wouldn't be afraid."