Sunset Park resident stabbed to death outside old Crown KTV location

BY JAIME DEJESUS & HELEN KLEIN

A 41-year-old man was stabbed to death in Sunset Park outside a location with a long and sordid history.

Authorities say that on Sunday, April 1 at around 4 a.m., Wei Lin got into a dispute with an unknown perp outside a karaoke club near Eighth Avenue and 64th Street and was stabbed three times in the chest.

Afterwards, Lin, a Sunset Park resident, reportedly got into a cab and was driven to Maimonides Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

The current club operates inside premises doing business as Go One Sushi, Inc. However, the location — which once roiled the community as Crown KTV — has a long and “problematic” history, though it had been “dormant” for a while, according to a police source.

Five people were stabbed outside Crown KTV in August, 2011, and in September, 2010, a confrontation between a bouncer and six young people attempting to enter the club left the bouncer with a broken leg. Back in 2013, the 68th Precinct reported 50 9-1-1 calls related to Crown KTV, as well as eight arrests, including two on felony charges. On June 6, 2014, the State Liquor Authority cancelled Crown KTV’s liquor license.

Three complaints about noise inside Go One Sushi were made to 3-1-1 on January 6, 2018, according to Open Data. Go One Sushi was denied a liquor license in August, 2015. Among the issues, according to Community Board 10 District Manager Josephine Beckmann, was an unwillingness “to remove the karaoke component and operate as a restaurant.”

Specifically, according to the SLA’s report of its August 18, 2015 meeting, there was concern that Go One Sushi’s owners intended, despite saying that they had decided not to operate a karaoke club, to do precisely that, “suggest[ing],” said the report, “that it was attempting to mislead CB 10 regarding the type of business that would be operated at this location.”

A year and a half later, a third corporation, Ming Hao, Inc. took steps to apply for a liquor license at the location in April, 2017. CB 10 recommended at that time that the SLA deny the license unless Ming Hao complied with a series of stipulations, according to documentation provided by CB 10. However, according to William Crowley, spokesperson for the SLA, Ming Hao never actually applied to the SLA for a license to sell alcohol.

In the current murder, no arrests have been made and the investigation is ongoing.

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