The new year got off to a bloody start in the city yesterday with six murders, cops said.
The first known slaying of 2000 occurred at 3:25 a.m. in the Kensington section of Brooklyn, when Dickens Desir, 31, was fatally shot in the back in front of 1249 Ocean Ave., police said.
Two people were spotted fleeing the scene in a red Jeep.
“I heard fighting, and then I heard the shots,” said Stephanie Lewis, who was in the building visiting her mother. “I thought it was just fireworks, people celebrating the New Year.”
Then at around 4:25 p.m., two Brooklyn men were found dead in Brownsville.
VaSean Edwards, 26, was shot in the head and the back. His body was found inside an abandoned apartment building at 207 Ralph Ave.
During a police search of the scene, a body tentatively identified as Darnell Robinson, 40, was discovered in an airshaft in the building.
Both men had drug-related arrest records, police said.
Less than three hours later, 28-year-old Sean Darzy was fatally shot once in the back at 95 Lenox Ave. in Harlem.
At 11:22 p.m., a woman was shot in the head and killed at a home at 1245 E. 83rd St. in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Her assailant was not known.
Then less than 10 minutes later, a livery cab driver was shot and killed during an apparent robbery at 30th Street and 39th Avenue in Astoria, Queens.
The murders come amid an overall decrease in city crime — but a 6 percent rise in slayings — in 1999.
Last year, three people were killed on New Year’s Day.
Meanwhile, in Huntington Station on Long Island, a 47-year-old woman was killed when a man at a party she was attending went outside the house to fire his handgun to celebrate the new year — and a stray shot went through the front window and hit her in the head.