The NYPD arrested a man suspected of fatally stabbing two homeless people on line A and severely injuring two others during a wave of unprovoked violence that began on Friday morning and continued through Saturday morning.
Rigoberto Lopez, 21, was arrested on Saturday night and was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. Lopez’s address, provided by NYPD, is a homeless shelter located at the Red Lion Inn on Butler Street on Boerum Hill.
Lopez’s victims were all homeless. The bodies of the two murder victims were found at opposite ends of Line A – the first at Mott Avenue-Beach 22nd Street station in Far Rockaway, Queens, where a man was found stabbed to death on a subway bench at about 11:20 am. pm on Friday. Approximately two hours later, a 44-year-old woman was found dead with knife wounds on a train at the Inwood-207th Street terminal.
The first known stabbing victim in the alleged Lopez spree was attacked on Friday morning, when a 67-year-old man was stabbed inside the Fort Washington-181st Street subway station. The victim survived the attack and was treated at a local hospital. The fourth reported victim was stabbed in the back at the same station around 1:15 am on Saturday. This 43-year-old man was hospitalized in stable condition.
With an alleged serial killer on the loose, the NYPD flooded the subway system with an additional 500 officers, assigning at least one officer to each of New York’s 472 subway stations on Saturday and Sunday. At a news conference on Saturday, New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea told reporters “there is a small army of detectives and investigators working on this all night, all over New York City.”
A NYPD spokesman said on Sunday that Lopez was taken into custody at the 34th Police Station, which includes Inwood and the subway station where the last stabbings took place. No additional details were immediately available about the arrest, but police sources told the NY Post that the suspect had blood stains on his sneakers.
The NYPD tweeted the photo of a knife that was supposedly in Lopez’s possession at the time of his arrest:
Police sources told the Daily News that Lopez is mentally ill and has been arrested four times, including an arrest for assault in January.