Two men were stabbed in what appeared to be random, unprovoked attacks on Manhattan's Upper West Side on Thursday afternoon, leaving the normally busy neighborhood in a state of shock. Police took a man into custody a short time later, and investigators were working to piece together whether he was the person responsible for the pair of stabbings that unfolded within a few blocks of one another.
The violence began when the attacker approached one of the victims, a 57-year-old man, and stabbed him a single time in the chest. That was the first of the two attacks, striking a man who, according to police, had done nothing to provoke the assault before the blade was driven into him in the middle of the afternoon on a crowded stretch of the West Side.
A second stabbing followed a short distance away, at West 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Police said the suspect walked up to a 50-year-old man who was standing on the sidewalk there, approached him from behind, and stabbed him as well. The two attacks together left investigators treating the episode as a string of seemingly random assaults on strangers.
The attacks happened at around 1:30 in the afternoon, turning an ordinary weekday into chaos as people on the street tried to understand what was happening. Witnesses described a man armed with a sharp object moving through the area, and the apparently unprovoked nature of the violence left residents rattled about being targeted at random in broad daylight.
Officers followed the trail to a building on Amsterdam Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets, where the confrontation appeared to come to an end. Police walked a man out of that building and took him into custody a short time after the stabbings, though investigators cautioned they were still working to confirm whether he was the suspect wanted in the case.
Both of the wounded men were taken to the hospital, and while one of the victims was initially listed in critical condition, authorities said both are expected to be okay. Investigators said they were examining a screwdriver and a blade as the possible weapons used in the attacks, as the effort to establish exactly what happened on the Upper West Side continued.