2 men arrested in violent Staten Island home invasion: police

Editor’s note: The story in the video player originally aired on Dec. 19, 2023.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. (PIX11) – Two men have been arrested in connection with a violent home invasion on Staten Island last December that involved robbers allegedly pistol-whipping a woman and a 5-year-old girl, police said Thursday.

Michael Conley and Elliot Knight, both 28-year-old Staten Island residents, were arrested Wednesday and charged with burglary in connection with the Dec. 18 incident, according to the NYPD.

Conley and Knight were allegedly among four masked gunmen who stormed into a sleeping family’s home on Livingston Avenue in the dead of night. The robbery was captured on home security video.

The robbers stormed upstairs with flashlights, searching four bedrooms, and found two sleeping children, their mother and nanny, Marlene Jones.

“I was sleeping, then I heard the door kicked in. I jumped up and saw three men with guns pointed at me,” Jones recalled in an interview with PIX11 News in December.

Jones said she immediately thought about the safety of the 4-year-old boy and 5-year-old girl and began to pray.

“They went to the little girl’s room, pulled her out from her bed, hit her in the face with the gun and then they took her in the mom’s room,” Jones said.

With her husband away for the night, the 33-year-old mother, who wished to remain anonymous, said she was also pistol-whipped in the face .

“The minute he brought [my daughter] to my room … when she showed up with the black eye, I thought he could kill us,” the mother said.

The robbers left the home with only a cellphone, police said.

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