NEW YORK (AP) — A man has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the fatal stabbings of three people in random attacks across Manhattan, police said Tuesday.
Ramon Rivera, 51, was taken into custody after he was found with blood on his clothes and the two kitchen knives, authorities said. He awaited arraignment Tuesday. A message seeking comment was left with an attorney who represented him in a prior case.
“Three New Yorkers. Unprovoked attacks that left us searching for answers on how something like this could happen,” Mayor Eric Adams said at a news conference Monday afternoon.
Investigators were working to understand what propelled the rampage, which happened within 2 1/2 hours Monday.
“No words exchanged. No property taken. Just attacked, viciously,” said Joseph Kenny, the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives. “He just walked up to them and began to attack them with the knives.”
The first stabbing, on West 19th Street, killed a 36-year-old construction worker, Angel Lata Landi, who was standing by his work site near the Hudson River a little before 8:30 a.m., police said. About two hours later and across the island of Manhattan, a 68-year-old man was attacked while fishing in the East River near East 30th Street.
Both men died shortly after the stabbings, Kenny said. The fisherman’s name was not immediately released.
The suspect then apparently traveled north near the riverfront. Around 10:55 a.m., a 36-year-old woman identified as Wilma Augustin was stabbed multiple times near the United Nations headquarters on East 42nd Street, Kenny said. She died later Monday at a hospital, police said.
A passing cabdriver saw the third attack and alerted police on nearby First Avenue and East 46th Street, officials said. An officer soon apprehended the suspect.
The bloodshed happened in a major city where, like in others, crime has taken a prominent place in political discourse and everyday concerns in the years since pandemic lockdowns emptied streets and spurred disorder. Killings in New York City so far in 2024 have declined 14% in two years, but serious assaults are up about 12%, according to police statistics.
Some recent stabbings in public places have drawn attention, including a fatal attack at the Coney Island subway station just weeks ago.
Adams, a Democrat, called Monday’s violence “a clear, clear example” of failures in the criminal justice system and elsewhere.
The suspect in Monday’s rampage, who apparently is homeless, had been sentenced in a criminal case a few months ago and was arrested in a grand larceny case last month, officials said.
The rampage came three years after a string of stabbings at various points along a subway line killed two people and wounded two others within a few hours.
In 2019, four people who were sleeping in doorways and sidewalks in Chinatown were beaten to death, and a fifth was seriously injured, early one Saturday morning.
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Associated Press writers Karen Matthews in New York and Anthony Izaguirre in Albany, New York, contributed to this report.