Hours after beginning a citywide manhunt focused on capturing the attacker in a series of random stabbings in Queens, the New York City police said Wednesday night that they had a person of interest in custody.
The development followed a news conference at which top Police Department officials had said they were flooding the city with officers in an all-out push to arrest a man they had linked to five stabbings within blocks of each other in southeast Queens over the past nine days.
“We have a heavy presence in the streets,” John M. Chell, the Police Department’s chief of patrol, said at the news conference. “And it will remain that way until we take this person off the streets.”
No further information was provided Wednesday night on the person in custody.
Three of the stabbings occurred early Wednesday; one happened just after midnight Tuesday; and the fifth occurred on Jan. 8, officials said. None of the victims sustained life-threatening injuries, but the attacks were still unsettling. Each of those stabbed was engaged in a routine activity like going to work when they were assaulted.
In the first stabbing, officials said, a 61-year-old man was near the intersection of 134th Avenue and 157th Street at around 6:30 p.m. when he felt “as if he had been punched” in the back, Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, said at the news conference. The man was taken to Jamaica Hospital and treated for a puncture wound to his kidney.
“The suspect actually laughed in the victim’s face after he stabbed him,” Chief Kenny said, noting that the weapon used in all of the attacks was a hunting knife.
The victim of the second assault, a 34-year-old woman, was returning home from work by bus just after midnight Tuesday when she was attacked, officials said. After she got off the bus at Guy Brewer Boulevard and 134th Avenue, a man ran up behind her and struck her in the right side of her back. She soon realized she had been stabbed.
The third and fourth assaults occurred within about five minutes of each other on Wednesday morning, officials said. At about 7:30 a.m., a 74-year-old man was walking his wife to work along 134th Avenue when the same suspect ran up behind the couple and stabbed the man once in the back, the police said.
The attacker then ran to 161st Street, where he encountered a 41-year-old man who had just left his home to move his car, officials said. The suspect approached the man, stabbed him once in the abdomen and ran off.
The fifth attack occurred about a half-hour later at the intersection of Parsons Boulevard and Archer Avenue following a verbal dispute between the stabbing suspect and the victim, a 36-year-old man on his way to work, officials said. He was stabbed once in the back.
