Nine-year-old girl charged with fatal stabbing

A nine-year-old girl fatally stabbed an 11-year-old girl in the chest with a kitchen knife during a fight over a ball, authorities in New York said.

The nine-year-old, whose name wasn’t released, was charged with manslaughter.

Police spokesman Paul J. Browne told The New York Times he was “unaware of anyone younger implicated in such an act in New York City.”

The victim, Queen Washington, 11, was pronounced dead at a hospital.

“I don’t understand how this could happen,” Joyce Porter, Queen’s grandmother, told the Times. She said Queen’s mother had called her earlier. “She told me: ‘Queen is dead’. It was over a ball.”

The girls had been playing together at the nine-year-old’s apartment, but the girl’s mother had stepped out to borrow something from a neighbour, police said.

A spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said the case would go to family court because the girl is younger than 14.

In 1999, 12-year-old Lionel Tate became the youngest person in modern US history to be sentenced to life in prison for the killing of six-year-old Tiffany Eunick in Florida.

He won a new trial on appeal and went free in January 2004 under a deal that placed him under house arrest for a year followed by probation for 10 years. Now 18, he was arrested this month for allegedly holding up a pizza delivery man at gunpoint.