4 more slain in the city

THE GIRLS, ages 5 and 12, awoke in their Ogontz home yesterday morning and went looking for their mother.

They bounded into the front bedroom of their home on Conlyn Street near Old York Road and came upon her lifeless body in a pool of blood on her bed, her stomach slashed with stab wounds.

The terrified youngsters ran to the garage, where their uncle lives, and screamed for help. Police pronounced the woman dead at the scene.

She was one of four people slain in the city yesterday as weary detectives struggled to keep up with the latest bloody outbreak of violence in the city.

In the Ogontz slaying, police said it appeared there were no signs of forced entry and that the unidentified woman struggled with her knife-wielding killer.

As police and crime-scene investigators filed in and out of the white and black rowhouse, neighbors gathered on each side of the police tape.

Two distraught men arrived, desperate for police to tell them what had happened to their loved one.

One of the men refused comment saying only, "I don't want my niece's name out there like that."

A neighbor who asked that her name not be used said, "You could stand out here for hours and hear thousands of stories.

"I'm so sick of all of this. Tragedy shouldn't be what brings us together."

"She was a good girl, a really nice lady," said another neighbor, Lisa Ivery. "I feel awful for her, but what about her children? I can't even imagine what they went through."

"It's very upsetting," said Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson, who arrived at the scene.

"If it was two mothers in a year it would be upsetting, but today it's two mothers killed in 24 hours."

The Conlyn Street killing came on the heels of another murder in Crescentville hours earlier.

Police were called shortly before 7:30 a.m. to the Hill Creek Housing Development on Hill Creek Drive near Adams Avenue, where they found an unidentified 28-year-old woman dead of an apparent puncture wound to the chest.

Investigators were still trying to determine what kind of weapon had been used in the slaying.

As crime-scene tape cordoned off the scene, a group of children tossed a football back and forth seemingly unfazed by the police cruisers and investigators gathering evidence just yards away from the youngsters' makeshift football field.

Residents of the housing development only knew the woman as Inez and said she had a year-old son and a fiance who worked as a custodian at La Salle University.

"A neighbor heard the baby screaming. He looked through the mail slot and saw the body lying there, so he kicked the door in and called the police," said Charles Powell, who said he broke the news to Inez's fiance.

"I actually got tongue-tied because I didn't know how I was going to tell him, but once I did, he just collapsed," Powell said. "He was just shaking.

"It's so sad."

Homicide detectives processed another crime scene shortly before 1 p.m. yesterday at 23rd and Morris streets, South Philadelphia, where an unidentified 29-year-old man had been shot multiple times in the chest.

He died at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania shortly after 2 p.m.

Also wounded in that incident was a 67-year-old man. Police said he had been shot in the ankle and remained in stable condition at HUP last night.

Police also were investigating the slaying of a man whose body was found in the alley behind a Chinese restaurant on 16th Street near Flora in North Philadelphia shortly after 2 p.m. yesterday.

Cops said the man, believed to be in his 30s or 40s, had been found with a gunshot wound to the head. He was pronounced dead on the scene at about 2:30 p.m. *