New York police arrested a man in connection with a series of stab attacks on the subway that killed two and injured two others, the department said on Sunday.
Rigoberto Lopez, 21, faces two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of attempted second-degree murder and a single charge of first-degree murder, according to the New York Police Department. Authorities said the day before Lopez’s arrest that police called Fort Washington station around 11:20 am on Friday and found a 67-year-old man suffering from knife wounds.
Police officers found a dead man at a station in Far Rockaway with knife wounds to his face and neck after another call around 11:30 pm Friday. A few hours later, an employee of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority found a woman stabbed on a train.
The woman, 44, died at a local hospital.
Another man, 43, with knife wounds was found at the Fort Washington subway station at the same time, police said. He told police that he was attacked by an unidentified man.
All four attacked individuals are considered homeless, police said.
Eric Adams, the district president of Brooklyn, said in a statement that the city’s current approach to subway safety is “failing”, noting that stabbings occur amid a wave of other violent crimes on public transport trains.
“The perpetrators of this violence often struggle with some form of severe mental illness and their targets are often some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers, including our homeless neighbors who seek the subway system as a refuge during the winter months,” he said in a statement.
New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said on Saturday that an additional 500 police officers would be sent across the city to patrol the subway stations.
Neither the NYPD nor the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was immediately available to respond to NBC News’s request for more information. It is not clear whether Lopez still hired a lawyer.
