By Jon Schuppe and Olivia Scheck
DNAinfo Staff
HARLEM — Three men were stabbed in a string of apparently random attacks early Wednesday morning at a Lexington Avenue subway entrance and near Marcus Garvey Park, police said.
The attacker was on the loose all morning. Police were searching for a man in his 20s in a black shirt and blue jeans.
The violence began just before 5 a.m. at the corner of East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, near the entrances to the 4, 5 and 6 subway lines, police said. The first victim, 26, was stabbed in his torso and his left arm, police said. The second, 48, was stabbed in his torso and back.
One of them staggered down the steps into the subway station. Hours later, a bloody white t-shirt remained on the station floor.
A few minutes later, the attacker struck again at East 120th Street and Fifth Avenue, near Marcus Garvey Park, police said. His third victim was a 27-year-old man who was stabbed once in the back.
The attacker then fled into the park, police said.
The first two victims were taken to Harlem Hospital. The 26-year-old was in serious condition and the 48-year-old was stable, police said.
The third victim was in stable condition at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital.
The attacker used what appeared to be a military-style knife, a police officer at the scene said. Officers chased him into the park, but he got away. He may have cut himself, because officers noticed a blood trail that ended inside the park.
A team of evidence collection officers spread out through the park looking for the weapon.
A block away from the park, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 119th Street, a puddle of dried blood was cordoned off by police tape.
At the scene of the first two attacks, a blood trail led from one of the subway entrances to the East 125th Street curb. A blood-soaked shirt lay on the sidewalk on the northwest corner of the intersection.
Frank Grecco, a retired 22-year NYPD veteran who worked as a detective in East Harlem, now owns a Famiglia pizzeria just steps away from the scene. He wasn’t there at the time, but he said the intersection — “the Times Square of East Harlem” — attracted the best and worst of the neighborhood.
From sunrise to midnight, the corner teems with commuters, shoppers and business people, he said. But after that, drug dealers do a brisk business, selling “everything from loose cigarettes to marijuana to pills.”
Many of their customers are addicts getting treatment at nearby methadone clinics, he said. The corner is also populated by people who are emotionally unstable.
The police do a good job of keeping crimes in check, Grecco said. But the strongest police presence is during the day, and a second shift from 4 p.m. to midnight.
Outside his window, he could see NYPD surveillance cameras atop light poles overlooking the crime scene. He thought the cameras might have captured the attack.
