3 people are killed in random stabbings in New York City. A suspect is in custody

NEW YORK — A man fatally stabbed three people across a swath of Manhattan on Monday morning, carrying out a series of random attacks without uttering a word to his victims, officials said.

The 51-year-old suspect was in police custody after being found with blood on his clothes and the two kitchen knives he was carrying, authorities said. The suspect's and victims' names weren't immediately released.

“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.

Investigators were working to understand what propelled the rampage, which happened within 2 1/2 hours.

“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 who was standing by his work site near the Hudson River a little before 8:30 a.m. 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 suspect then apparently traveled north near the riverfront. Around 10:55 a.m., a 36-year-old woman 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.