A 40-year-old homeless man was arrested Wednesday on murder and attempted murder charges in the stabbing, one fatally, of three homeless people in Manhattan, police said. All the men were sleeping in the open when they were attacked last week.
The man, Trevon Murphy, 40, who has a history of arrests and who a cousin said suffers from mental illness, was spotted by a retired prison officer around 6:45 a.m. Wednesday near a Harlem park on West 128th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, Police Commissioner Kichant Sewell and Mayor Eric Adams said.
Retired prison officer Ruben Arias said he was riding a bus when he saw a man sitting on a bus stop bench wearing the same neon-colored sneakers and a black hoodie with the Innocence Project logo as the man in the police photos was distributed on Tuesday was worn.
Arias, 55, told the driver to let him go and approached two police officers nearby. “I said, ‘Look, I just spotted the guy going around stabbing people,'” he said. The officers, he added, didn’t believe him, so he called 911.
Mr. Arias, who has been a corrections officer for 21 years and worked at Rikers Island, said he stood at his post about a foot away from Mr. Murphy because he didn’t want him to go anywhere.
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The police soon arrived, arrested Mr. Murphy without a struggle and found a knife in his pants pocket, Assistant Chief Joseph Kenny said. Mr. Murphy “made statements to investigators identifying himself in still images related to the attacks,” Chief Kenny said.
The president of the city’s corrections officers union, Benny Boscio Jr., praised Mr. Arias’ quick thinking. “Even as retirees, our officers maintain a deep commitment to keeping our city safe, which is exactly what retired Officer Ruben Arias did today,” he said.
According to the police, Mr. Murphy approached a man sleeping on a bench by the Hudson River in the West Village on July 5 and stabbed him in the stomach; the man died at Bellevue Hospital.
On July 8, the police said, Mr. Murphy stabbed another man sleeping on a bench at Madison Avenue and East 49th Street in Midtown. And early Monday, they said, he stabbed a third man sleeping in a playground on East 95th Street on the Upper East Side. The two surviving men were in stable condition Tuesday, police said. Police have not released a motive for the attacks.
A cousin of Mr. Murphy’s, Tameka Wilkerson of Knoxville, Tennessee, said that Mr. Murphy had had “mental problems” for years and that he was sometimes paranoid, “hearing voices” and “seeing people.”
Growing up in Knoxville, Mr. Murphy, the son of a hospital nurse, “loved to play video games, tell jokes and loved sports, just a regular teenager,” Ms. Wilkerson said.
She said he worked as a patient transporter at a hospital before the mental illness overtook him, and that she had not been in contact with him for several years. She and several other family members heard that he had died.
The New York police said they had a warrant for Mr. Murphy’s arrest in Tennessee on a probation violation on a drug charge.
Although it’s unclear when he moved to New York, he was a client of the city’s Department of Homeless Services for the first time in 2018, according to an employee of a homeless service provider who spoke on condition of anonymity because as he was not authorized to discuss Mr. Murphy’s case.
In April this year, Mr Murphy was accused of assaulting a sleeping roommate at a homeless shelter near La Guardia Airport. According to court documents, Mr. Murphy’s roommate “was awakened by a blow to the face” and saw that Mr. Murphy was the only other person in the room. Mr Murphy was released without bail and was due back in court next week on the assault charge.
“This man should not have been on our streets,” said Commissioner Sewell.
Mr. Murphy stayed at a shelter in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in April and May of this year, the homeless services official said.
Homeless people with severe mental illness have been blamed for a string of recent high-profile attacks, including the fatal stampede of a woman in front of a subway train in January by a man who had schizophrenia and who had bounced around the city’s jails, hospitals and streets for decades.
That killing shined a light on New York’s broken emergency psychiatric care system for homeless people, in which hospitals repeatedly discharge patients without stabilizing them, and prompted officials to introduce multiple programs designed to increase accountability and prevent people from falling through the cracks.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Adams presided over the opening of a Bronx facility for people in mental health crises, a “support and liaison center” staffed by mental health providers and designed as an alternative to taking people to hospitals or arresting them.
“The answer to the mental health crisis is not the answer to public safety,” the mayor said. “It’s a health response, and changing that dynamic is critical.”
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