THREE SLAYING VICTIMS CALLED 'CLEAN, HARD-WORKING PEOPLE'

Grieving relatives of the three people shot to death Monday in a quiet
Queens neighborhood opened the morning papers yesterday hoping for more
details about the puzzling slayings and some hint of who the killers could be.

What they encountered were reports that police officials were pondering
whether the family had ever dealt drugs.

"Three people are killed — clean, hard-working people — and all we hear is
the police looking for drugs instead of looking for the killers," said
Jennifer Chambers, an older sister of Carren Chambers, 34, who was found
shot to death along with her husband, Larie Barnes, 39, and her
half-sister, Tisha Chambers, 21. "If they had done bad stuff and lived a
risky life, I could see it. But these were people working hard and raising
children."

The three were all found shot in the head just after noon on Monday in
their two-story house in Cambria Heights, in southeast Queens near the
Belmont Park racetrack.

Law enforcement officials said on Monday that the killers' apparent search
of the house and the brutal nature of the slayings were among the reasons
that detectives were pursuing drugs as one of several possible motives for
the crime.

Yesterday, a law enforcement official said the motive was still unclear.
The police said that none of the victims had criminal records.

There were no suspects, a police spokesman said last night.

Investigators yesterday brought a police dog to the house to search for
drugs. The animal indicated that there had been marijuana in the house at
some point, but law enforcement officials said it was not known how much
had been there and when.

"Whether this has any connection at all to drugs is still up in the air,"
one official said.

The body of Carren Chambers was discovered by her 12-year-old son, Kadeem,
when he returned from school. He found his aunt in a pool of blood on the
kitchen floor and then his mother at the bottom of the basement stairs.

"He came running to my house and said, `Help me turn my mom over, she's
bleeding on the floor,' " said Jermaine John, 11, Kadeem's neighbor and
best friend..

Yesterday, Kadeem was in the basement of the nearby home of his maternal
grandmother, Vera McCalla, and her husband, Lawrence McCalla. He would not
speak a word, relatives said. He had read the papers, too.

Other family members at the McCalla home sat in the shade on the porch and,
in strong Jamaican accents, denounced the implication that the killings
were somehow linked to drugs.

They described the married couple as hard-working people who lived for
their children and to improve their lives and their home, which was always
open to neighbors.

Mr. Barnes owned a hardware store on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. His wife,
Carren Chambers, worked two jobs as an accountant and was putting herself
through college at night, family members said. Her half-sister was a law
student visiting from Jamaica, they said.