A man shot dead by cops after stabbing his wife in the stomach attacked his spouse during an International Woman’s Day party in Queens, a relative told The Post.
Amira Nematov was “in a lot of pain,” said the relative, who spoke from the woman’s hospital bedside Saturday.
“She’s out of it. She is only saying, ‘It hurts,’ and that’s it.”
The Friday night horror in Forest Hills happened among close family and friends who gathered to mark the holiday, which is a significant day in the family’s native Uzbekistan and other post-Soviet republics.
Her husband, Djamshed Nematov, “hasn’t been well,” said the relative, who would not give their name.
“He was having hallucinations. It may have been depression. Mental health. … Something was going on in his head.”
The 46-year-old’s apparent struggles included a lot of physical pain from a hernia, which prevented him from doing his job as a home health aide, the relative said, while the mental problems started a month ago and included “seeing things that weren’t there” and “having strange conversations with himself.”
“He needed to get treatment, but he wouldn’t go to the doctor,” the relative lamented. “Amira was worried about him. Even after everything that happened, she was worried about him, she kept asking, ‘How is my husband.'”
NYPD officers responding to 911 calls of the stabbing fatally shot Nematov after he refused to drop the knife, authorities said.
The wife, 43, does not yet know her husband is dead. She has undergone one surgery at Elmhurst Medical Center and may need more. The couple had four kids.
“They have been married for 20 plus years. They had a beautiful marriage. They were very happy. We don’t know how this happened,” the relative said.
“I had shown up when everything already happened,” the distraught family member said, speaking in Russian.
“… There was blood in the hallway. They were trying to revive him. I just wanted to stop by and say happy March 8, give Amira flowers, but I didn’t make it in time.”
Long time neighbors told The Post they never heard the couple fight until recently.
However moments before the stabbing, which unfolded just before 7 p.m. on the second floor of their 62nd Avenue building, they heard screaming and then gunfire as cops tried to stop Nematov, who authorities said refused to drop the 12-inch knife he was carrying.
“We heard a lot of arguing, yelling,” neighbor Marcella Rueda told The Post on Saturday.
“We heard kids in the hallway, back and forth, and then it went silent for a bit, maybe a minute or two, and then we heard the four gunshots,” she said.
“It was really scary. [The gunshots] they were really really loud,” she added.
Police said there had been some sort of dispute. Hours before the stabbing the wife called her brother, confiding she and her husband were “having problems,” he told The Post.
The cops ordered Nematov, who has not been publicly identified, to “drop the knife,” but he refused and “charged” at them with the weapon, police said. One of the cops, a sergeant, then discharged his Taser, while two officers fired their guns at least four times, striking the suspect.
Neighbor Rueda said she’d watched the couple’s four kids — two daughters ages 23 and 20 and two sons ages 17 and 14 — grow up.
“We would hear a lot of arguing from other families on this floor, but not from this family. Maybe like last week I heard some arguing, [for the first time] but that’s all I heard, nothing crazy,” she said.
“They are a really nice family, very well mannered. The girls always greeted us.”
Now the couple’s kids have to pick up the pieces, the relative said.
“The children weren’t injured, but they have to deal with this,” they said.
