If his father hadn’t insisted that he go to school on Monday, 13-year-old Kadeem Chambers’ body would have been found in his family’s blood-splattered Queens home along with those of his father, mother and aunt, the youngster’s friends said yesterday.
“His dad saved his life,” said Donovan Mason, Kadeem’s classmate at PS 176 in Cambria Heights.
There was only a half-day of school Monday and “Kadeem didn’t want to go, but his dad made him,” said Donovan, 12.
“He’d be gone, too, if he stayed home,” he said.
Kadeem came upon the grisly murder scene when he returned home from school at noon.
He used the side door leading into the kitchen and saw his aunt Tisha Chambers, 21, lying on the floor face down in a pool of blood, still in the T-shirt and panties she had been wearing when he left for school a few hours earlier.
Kadeem raced outside and across 120th Avenue to buddy Jermaine’s house, where he blurted out, “My aunt’s bleeding on the floor.”
Jermaine, thinking Tisha had cut herself, asked his cousin, Mookie, 21, if he could go and see the blood. She said sure.
After they entered the house, Kadeem began searching frantically for his mother. He didn’t spot her until he was heading back out through the side door to get help for Tisha.
His mother, Carren Chambers, 36, was lying at the bottom of the basement stairs.
“Oh, God, my Mom’s right here. Help me turn her over. Oh please, help me turn her over,” he pleaded to Jermaine.
Jermaine helped and then left his friend to get his cousin.
When Mookie walked into the kitchen, Tisha was lying dead on the floor and a panic-stricken Kadeem was saying, “I can’t find my father.”
Cops, responding to a 911 call, arrived minutes later and found the teen’s father, Larie Barnes, 40, in a back room in the basement.
Kadeem at first didn’t realize his parents and aunt were dead – killed by gunshot blasts to the head in what cops describe as execution-style slayings.
He cried when he finally learned they were all dead, she said.
Soon after, Kadeem turned silent. “He’s not talking at all, he’s in a daze,” said a relative.
Kadeem and his 5-year-old sister, Shaunice, who was at preschool when the murders took place, are now staying with family members.
“It’s horrifying. There’s nothing we can do for them right now. We can’t tell them it’s gonna be all right,” said Lawrence McCalla, their stepgrandfather.
Police believe the killer or killers were searching for drugs or money.
Additional reporting by Murray Weiss