A woman walking to work for her early morning shift Sunday was fatally stabbed in the back less than a mile from her Brooklyn home — an ambush her anguished family believes was the heinous work of a man who’d been stalking her.
Dorothy Clarke-Rozier, 50, was cutting through a parking lot on Albany Ave. near Glenwood Rd. in East Flatbush about 5:50 a.m. to get her job at a nearby Pathmark store when she was attacked, police said.
Initially, the woman believed she was struck in the back with a stick, according to radio transmissions.
Clarke-Rozier stumbled over to her manager at the nearby Pathmark and said, “They assault me, they assault me with a slow voice and she said, ‘I’m hot I’m hot, I’m hot’ and then they called the ambulance,” her sister, Myrtle Clarke, 55, told the Daily News.
The woman, who picked up the extra shift after a coworker called out sick, collapsed on the pavement.
“She wasn’t bleeding out but they saw this big knife in her back,” Clarke said.
Medics rushed Clarke-Rozier to Kings County Hospital, but she could not be saved.
Her sister, who works at Brookdale Hospital, received a call from a doctor at Kings County.
“I said, ‘Yes, that’s my sister’ and he said, ‘Well I have some bad news,’” Clarke said. “I was destroyed, I was numb, I was in tears. I was like, ‘Are you sure it was Dorothy Clarke? And the doctor said, ‘Yes.’”
According to Clark, her sister had struck up a friendship with a man a few months ago, but the relationship turned volatile and controlling.
“She said one day she was coming from work, she took her bag and was walking and the guy jumped out at her and said, ‘I thought you were going with a different man,’” Clarke said.
The man also began showing up at Clarke-Rozier’s work unannounced and sending her aggressive text messages, the sister recounted.
Though Clarke-Rozier didn’t contact the police, her family believes the man had something to do with her death, her sister said.
“Somebody want her dead because they didn’t rob her,” Clarke said. “She had money in her bag, the police said, and her phone and her jewelry.”
Clarke-Rozier moved to the city from Montego Bay, Jamaica, after meeting her husband at a wedding in the states in 2019, the sister said. Though still married, Clarke-Rozier’s husband lives in Philadelphia. She had a son who still lives in Jamaica.
Cops have made no arrests in the killing.
“I can’t imagine someone so wicked,” Clarke said of her sister’s assailant.
