A mass stabbing took place at New York City’s Penn Station less than a day before President Donald Trump was set to make an appearance across the street for an NBA Finals game.
It’s yet another serious and ultimately inexcusable violent crime episode that has taken place in a big city public transportation system this year.
At around 7 p.m. Sunday night, a deranged man allegedly stabbed five people in one of the biggest train hubs in the country before being apprehended.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has called for using more social workers instead of the New York City Police Department for addressing mental health episodes, wrote Sunday night on X that he’d been “briefed on the stabbing” and that his “heart is with everyone who was injured, their loved ones, and all those shaken by this unacceptable violence.”
One of the victims described the Penn Station attack in an interview with the New York Post.
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“He went at me to kill me. I saw the rage in his eyes,” New York resident Henry Obadiah, 60, said of his alleged assailant, according to the New York Post. “ … The crazy guy locked his eyes on me and just roundhoused me … I heard the guy on the escalator say, ‘He’s got a knife! He’s got a knife!’”
Obadiah said that he thought he’d just been punched but eventually realized he’d been slashed across the face.
“I didn’t realize I had just been slashed in the face,” he said. “I thought he just punched me. I felt my lip got busted and I saw the blood, but I took a look into my phone and saw the big cut in my face and I just ran up to the cop and said, ‘I just got attacked.’”
The attacker continued his rampage, according to the Post, causing mass panic in the station until he was finally taken down by police.
As for the attacker, ABC News noted in its initial report that it was a man “experiencing homelessness.”
It’s amazing the hoops legacy media go through not to just say the plain, simple truth.
I suppose part of the homeless “experience” is wandering around public spaces, raving like a lunatic, and stabbing people, right?
Later reports confirmed that the alleged stabber is Hector Deleon, a 51-year-old man believed to be homeless, who, according to the Post, was “previously arrested in New Jersey in May on assault and narcotics charges.”
So, we have a record of violent crime from just a month ago. Shocker.
It’s hard not to notice the Penn Station attack as being part of a larger pattern of grisly, high-profile incidents of vicious, seemingly random violent attacks in public spaces.
Overall crime—assuming we can trust the official statistics—is down in New York City as it is in many other cities. But there has been a significant statistical spike in big, dramatic assaults and murders on public transportation as of late. These incidents almost always involve individuals with long criminal rap sheets or histories of mental illness, and in most cases, both.
In March, a man with over 100 prior arrests allegedly set a homeless person on fire in Penn Station. According to reports, the man had been on “parole for a 2018 robbery, when he slashed a student’s face and took cash from his pockets. That victim required more than 100 stitches.”
In April, a crazed man calling himself “Lucifer” reportedly slashed three people with a machete before being shot and killed by police.
In May, a mentally disturbed “ex-Broadway dancer” allegedly threw a man down the stairs of New York City’s 18th Street subway station and killed him after just hours after being detained for threatening members of the NYPD.
And now we have this incident in June.
This quotation in The Times from a witness to Sunday’s Penn Station attack perfectly captures how things are in certain parts of not just New York but other cities, too.
“This part of town is just so full of mentally ill people, people off their meds, people on drugs wandering around like they’re on another planet. And every once in a while, they have a knife in their pocket.”
Unhinged people constantly wander the halls of Penn Station and other public places. They’re mostly harmless, most of the time, either passed out in a heap or ranting and raving to themselves. But they exude a near constant vibe of danger.
The kind of behavior seen in the following X post is a common occurrence.
When will their delusions turn violent? That’s always the question.
And that gets to the real and obvious problem here. These incidents keep happening because of clear public policy choices. Blue cities dodge the issues of drug use, mental illness, and recidivism for violent criminals and instead focus on “housing” or addressing the alleged “roots” of crime.
The reality is that those with a pattern of serious mental illness should be institutionalized. Repeat offenders should face long-term or near-permanent incarceration instead of being allowed back on the street time and again before they kill someone.
Until priorities shift, violent incidents like what happened at Penn Station on Sunday are going to continue to be a regular feature of urban living.
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