A man wanted for fatally shooting his girlfriend — a first-grade teacher — turned the gun on himself as police tried to coax him out of a Bronx apartment Thursday to arrest him for the tragic slaying, police sources said.
Police responded to an apartment on Pratt Ave. near Conner St. in Baychester around 2:20 p.m., where the 35-year-old suspect, accused of fatally shooting 31-year-old Jessica Hoyle, was laying low with an acquaintance, according to police and sources.
As officers attempted to arrest the man on a warrant, he barricaded himself inside the apartment. After hours of negotiations, the man shot himself, according to police sources.
“The police brought him out on a stretcher,” said a neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous. “He wasn’t moving. I thought he was dead.”
The man was taken to an area hospital; his condition was not immediately made clear.
The man is accused of gunning down Hoyle, a teacher at Children’s Aid College Prep Charter School in Crotona, inside her home on Mickle Ave. near Boston Road about 11 p.m. Tuesday, cops said.
The woman’s mother, who uses a wheelchair and lives in an apartment downstairs, heard the shot and called 911 but was unable to climb the stairs to check on her daughter.
The mother told police Hoyle and her boyfriend had been arguing all day before she heard the bang of a gun, and when cops arrived they found the teacher dead from a gunshot wound to the head.
