Thanks to Maspeth activist-about-town Christina Wilkinson for this one: After a night of drinking, someone ended up dead on the kitchen floor of a federal Customs agent’s Forest Hills home. The circumstances are hazy, but you can add that to the seemingly growing file of bizarre local deaths.

Last week I once again dealt with the topic of nothing ever happening in Forest Hills and Rego Park–nothing criminal, I mean, except for the occasional bank-robbery spree. Now it turns out that nothing ever happens in Kew Gardens, either. According to the Chron, the 102nd Precinct–that’s KG, Richmond Hill, Woodhaven and northern Ozone Park to you and me–had a paltry one murder in 2007, down from 10 in the previous year. Other sorts of crime weren’t down as much, but they were still down. So feel free to wave a bunch of money around in KG, too.

My favorite detail in the story: Queens is the “safest of the … boroughs,” except it’s not, because Staten Island is the safest borough. Man, if you think Queens gets the short shrift all the time, thank your lucky stars you don’t live anywhere you can only reach by ferry.

Because I’m terrified of everyone and everything, that’s why. Luckily, besides the occasional little family murder scandal and the scourge of organized stalking, nothing bad ever happens in Forest Hills and Rego Park. I’ve talked over and over again on this very site about how safe the 112th precinct is. I remember when I moved here–less than four years ago!–I told everybody that a big reason was that it was one of the safest neighborhoods in the city, with the property values of “up-and-coming” neighborhoods that were loads more dangerous. Seemed like crime rates had nowhere to go but up, but intrepid Daily News reporter Nick Hirshon reports today:

The 112th Precinct, where many aging cops used to go just before retiring, saw robberies drop 42.8% from 2006 - the best improvement in the borough.

Why? It’s because our cops aren’t senile anymore, Hirshon posits. The 112th is no longer “The Snooze Precinct”–now police officers under 60 may be lucky enough to land here. Sign me up!

With crime rates lower than basically anywhere, really, why live anywhere else?

So Queens Crap had an alarmist update earlier this week about MS-13 graffiti on a construction site in Forest Hills. I didn’t really touch it because the people I hear going on and on about MS-13 tend to be apocalyptic loons like Michael “You Should Only Get AIDS and Die, You Pig” Savage, plus isn’t Central American gang graffiti on a construction site as likely to come from undocumented Central American day laborers as from the nearby high school? Anyway, I filed that away until my commute home today, when I saw this artistically tagged on an otherwise unmemorable poster at the 75th Avenue subway station:

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In case you somehow missed it, the cops–in Georgia!–arrested a suspect in last month’s killing of a Bukharian dentist in front of his 4-year-old daughter and estranged wife. Surprise! He’s related to the aforementioned wife.

Mikhail Mallayev is, of course, innocent until proven guilty, but cops found his prints on the “silencer” (it was a bleach bottle wrapped in duct tape–very professional!). The cops already had his fingerprints because of a 1994 “subway fare-beating bust”–I think that means turnstile jumping. He certainly sounds like a class act.

“I don’t know anything,” he told the Daily News from jail. Sure, he was in New York at the time, but it was for a wedding.

Now, here’s the million-dollar question. The wife has never been declared a suspect. Was she involved in this? Maybe it just a matter of some family revenge without her prior knowledge–we know her family, independent of her, was not pleased with the victim. And would any mother want this to happen in front of her young daughter? This is only going to get more interesting, I think.

I hope you have, but I also kind of hope you haven’t. The police sketch makes him look like a cold-blooded killer–which, conveniently, he is–but slap a less dead-behind-the-eyes look on his face and he could be behind the counter at the post office. Which maybe isn’t such a good thing either.

This, of course, is the man who killed a Bukharian dentist on a Forest Hills playground right in front of his daughter and wife, who may or may not have something to do with it depending on who you ask and on what day.

If you see him, run. Then call the cops.

Oddly and disturbingly, the second deadly shooting in three weeks has taken place up by the LIE overpass in the North Forest Hills-Rego Park gray area. Unlike the last one, this appears to have a clear motive: a custody dispute. The killing seems to have been carried out by hitmen on a playground in the presence of the victim’s daughter. Charming.

I’m sorry to report that I’ve just learned — from my comments section, of all places — that the woman critically injured after being shot in a parked minivan up near the LIE a little more than a week ago has died. If you want to offer condolences, head over to the post linked above and do it there, as it seems like the family might be reading.

Police made a couple of arrests Tuesday in last Friday’s shooting of two people sitting in a minivan up in the “Rego Hills” netherworld by the LIE. They arrested a 37-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman. A woman’s potential involvement in something like this is an oddity, to be sure.

Still no indication of a motive, but the charges –  attempted murder, robbery, criminal possession of a weapon — seem to point to a botched robbery.

The good news? Four days later, the “extremely” critically injured victim is still alive, which I can only take to be a good sign for her eventual survival. She was shot in the face.

I’m a little late on this one, but in case you didn’t hear about the Forest Hills minivan shooting, well, here you have it. In the kind of crime that doesn’t happen around here too often, two people — a man and a woman — were wounded, one critically, when they were shot in a van parked up by the LIE. It happened in the wee hours of Friday morning. I can’t seem to find much recent reportage on this, but the story is still developing as the crime is being investigated. No word on the latest condition of the critically injured woman, either.

Pretty scary. I always cite the low crime rate as one of the best things about the neighborhood — though this did happen very close to the border with higher-crime Corona. In any event, something like this can happen anywhere; it’s just less likely to happen here.