STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Two men are dead and a third is in critical condition at Richmond University Medical Center Sunday after a rash of violence struck Staten Island's North Shore in the day's early morning hours.

The bloodletting began in Stapleton, just after 4 a.m., when a man in his 30s was shot in the head at the corner of Broad and Bay streets, according to police. He was rushed to Richmond University Medical Center, West Brighton, in critical condition, and remains critical at the hospital as of 11 a.m., an NYPD spokesman said.

Just an hour after the Stapleton shooting, two other men were pronounced dead in separate homicides on the North Shore.

The first homicide occurred at 5:08 a.m. on the 300 block of Britton Avenue in Concord, where a 40-year-old man was found shot in the head, according to police. The man was found unconscious and unresponsive on the street outside of a home and taken to Staten Island Unversity Hospital, Ocean Breeze, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Neighbors said he did not live at the home outside of which his body was found.

Only minutes after finding the man in Concord, officers discovered another body in Mariners Harbor.

There, opposite of 86 Arlington Place, a 23-year-old man was found dead with blunt force trauma to his head, police said. Police identified the victim as Mariners Harbor resident Devon Powell, of Holland Avenue. The cause of death remains under investigation, pending analysis by the medical examiner.

Powell was found just a few hundred feet from where two other men lost their lives earlier this year.

On April 1, Chinese food deliveryman Richard Salvia was ambushed and shot in the head after being lured to 244 Grandview Ave. on a phony delivery call, according to police. Three suspects have been charged in the slaying.

Then last month, on June 6,

in the neighborhood, police said. Steven Mickens, 18, of Arlington Place,

.