A television set decorator was found stabbed to death in her Queens home and her husband turned up dead in a nearby park hours later — another violent end for a young family in a city that can't keep its people safe.
Mary Kate Golding, 34, who worked on Amazon's "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" and Disney+'s "Goosebumps," was found with a fatal stab wound to her back in the basement of her Astoria residence shortly after midnight Tuesday, according to the NYPD. Her husband, Joseph Azzaretto, 33, was found unresponsive in Astoria Park just before 7 a.m. and pronounced dead at the scene. Police are investigating the deaths as a "possible murder-suicide."
Their 11-month-old son was found unharmed at the residence. The baby is now in the custody of Golding's parents, Us Weekly reported.
This wasn't a random act. Law enforcement sources told the New York Post that Azzaretto called Golding's friend to confess he killed her, according to Us Weekly. The friend then went to the home and discovered Golding's body — and the infant left alone with his mother's corpse.
The violence, it turns out, ran in the family. Us Weekly reported that Azzaretto's younger brother, Nicholas, killed their father, Frank, in February 2020 during a domestic dispute at the family's Pennsylvania home. Frank had allegedly been physically abusive toward his wife, Patricia, and Nicholas shot him in the upper torso after Frank pushed him into a basement during an argument. Nicholas pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in November 2021 and received 10 years of probation — no prison time, just electronic monitoring and a slap on the wrist.
A family with that kind of history, and the system couldn't see what was coming.
M Live and The Hollywood Reporter both covered the basic facts — the stabbing, the timeline, the career highlights. Neither mentioned the family's violent past. Us Weekly was the only outlet to dig into the Azzaretto family record, and the detail matters. A man raised in a home where the patriarch beat his wife and was ultimately killed for it grew up to allegedly stab his own wife in the back and abandon his infant son with her body.
Hollywood trade outlets framed this as a tragedy for the entertainment industry. The Hollywood Reporter led with Golding's credits — "Gotham," "Hawkeye," "The Flight Attendant" — and noted she graduated from NYU in 2015. M Live did the same. The professional accomplishments are real, but they're not the story. A woman is dead. A baby will grow up without parents. And the system that was supposed to see the warning signs — from a family with a murder in its recent history to whatever calls may or may not have been made — failed again.
The investigation remains ongoing. No formal classification of the deaths has been announced.
