51-year-old man is charged with murder after 3 are stabbed in New York
City rampage
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 [November 20, 2024]
By JENNIFER PELTZ
NEW YORK (AP) — A man has been charged with three counts of first-degree
murder in the fatal stabbings of three people in a string of 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.
“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.
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Ramon Rivera, a suspect arrested after multiple people were stabbed
early Monday, is escorted out by NYPD officers at the NYPD 10th
Precinct in New York, Monday, Nov. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
Rivera was arraigned Tuesday. The Legal Aid Society, which is
representing Rivera in court, declined to comment.
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.
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