“A ruthless killer is on the loose, but we will arrest him and put him in prison,” declared the Democratic mayors of both metropolises, who also urged the homeless to go to shelters until the suspect is captured.
“It is urgent: no one else has to die or be injured,” added the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, and that of Washington, Muriel Bowser, and asked the homeless to sleep in shelters until they are out of danger. .
Police are offering rewards of thousands of dollars for any information that leads to his identification and have released surveillance footage showing a bearded man dressed in black with a shaved head.
He is, according to them, responsible for five attacks perpetrated with the “same modus operandi” against men sleeping on the street.
“Our homeless population is one of the most vulnerable, and targeting them in their sleep is appalling,” said New York City Police Chief Keechant Sewel. They are “cowardly” acts, added his Washington counterpart, Robert Contee.
– Sleeping bag-
The first two took place at night, on March 3 and 8, in the northeast of the US capital. The victims, gunshot wounds, survived.
On Wednesday the 9th, also in Washington, the emergency services intervened because a homeless man’s tent was on fire. Inside they found the body of a deceased man. The autopsy revealed that he had been shot and stabbed multiple times.
According to investigators, the murderer then moved to New York, about 400 km to the north, where he committed two new attacks at dawn on Saturday.
A 38-year-old man was found injured but alive early this morning in lower Manhattan. In the afternoon the police found the body of another man, with injuries to the neck and head, in the same neighborhood.
According to images from video surveillance cameras, the suspect shot him around 06:00 local time, while the homeless man was sleeping, that is, shortly after the previous attack.
These images, broadcast by local channels, show a man dressed in black, with his head covered with a hood and blue gloves. He circles around a man wrapped in a yellow sleeping bag, kicking him lightly to check that he’s asleep, and looks around him before shooting.
– “In danger”-
Thousands of people sleep every night on the streets of New York. The Democratic mayor announced in February a plan to evict those who settle in the gigantic underground subway network.
This is how Eric Adams reacted to a series of crimes that grabbed headlines, such as the death of a woman pushed onto the subway tracks by a mentally ill homeless man.
Homeless defense associations oppose this plan. and this Sunday they blamed Adamos in part for the recent tragedies.
“Despite the headlines, the homeless in New York are much more likely to be victims of crimes than perpetrators” of them, reacted the Coalition for the Homeless, which asks the mayor “to recognize that his policies put them in danger. danger”.
More than 150 homeless people died in 2021 on the streets and parks of New York, the Urban Justice Center said, urging the mayor to offer housing solutions.
In Washington, the number of homeless people has also increased since the start of the pandemic and associations accuse the authorities of having dismantled several camps, sometimes installed near the White House.
In a shelter near Congress, Troi, a 53-year-old African American who lived on the streets for five years, told AFP that he is shocked by this crime wave, but not surprised: “It hurts when it’s close to you”, but “so many bad things happen to the homeless…”
