Man charged with murder after three people are stabbed during disaster in New York City

NEW YORK (AP) — A man has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the fatal stabbings of three people in a series of random attacks in Manhattan, police said Tuesday.

Ramon Rivera, 51, was taken into custody after he was found with blood on his clothing and the two kitchen knives, authorities said.

‘Three New Yorkers. Unprovoked attacks that left us looking for answers as to how something like this could happen,” Mayor Eric Adams said at a news conference Monday afternoon.

Investigators were trying to understand what led to the rampage, which happened within 2 1/2 hours on Monday.

“No words were exchanged. No property seized. I just attacked in a vicious manner,” said Joseph Kenny, chief of detectives for the New York Police Department. “He just walked up to them and started attacking them with the knives.”

The first stabbing, on West 19th Street, killed a 36-year-old construction worker, Angel Lata Landi, who was standing near his workplace on the Hudson River just before 8:30 a.m., police said. About two hours later, 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 riverbank. About 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 taxi driver saw the third attack and alerted police at nearby First Avenue and East 46th Street, officials said. An officer was quickly able to arrest the suspect.

Rivera was arraigned on Tuesday. The Legal Aid Society, which is representing Rivera in court, declined to comment.

The bloodshed took place in a major city where, like others, crime has figured prominently in political discourse and daily concerns in the years since pandemic lockdowns cleared the streets and caused disorder. Murders in New York City have fallen 14% in two years so far in 2024, but serious assaults have risen by about 12%, according to police statistics.

Several recent stabbings in public places have attracted attention, including one fatal one attack on 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 is apparently homeless, was convicted in a criminal case a few months ago and was arrested last month in a grand theft case, officials said.

The disaster came three years after a series of stabbings at various points along a metro line killed two people and injured two others within a few hours.

In 2019 that was four people sleeping in doorways and sidewalks in Chinatown were beaten to death and a fifth was seriously injured early on a 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.

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