By Michael Ventura
DNAinfo Senior Editor
MANHATTAN — Police were searching for suspects Monday morning after two men were stabbed to death and another was injured on the 2 train in Greenwich Village over the weekend.
Darnell Morel and Ricardo Williams, both 24 from Brooklyn, were found stabbed multiple times in the torso on a 2 train at the Houston Street stop Sunday morning after a night of partying, police said.
They were taken to St. Vincent's Hospital where they were pronounced dead. An unidentified third man, 23, was in stable condition at St. Vincent's with stab wounds to his arm and neck.
The melee started after a group of 10 men, heading home from the Cellar Bar in the Bryant Park Hotel, boarded a downtown 2 train at 42nd Street about 5 a.m, the New York Post reported.
When they got to 14th Street, one of them apparently tossed a bag of garbage out of the subway that accidentally hit another man, who pulled a knife and attacked.
"He...went right for a knife in his jacket," Bryan Woods, 24, a friend of the slain men, told the Daily News.
"We apologized to them," Woods told the Post. "We tried to tell them, 'Let's be cool about this. It's the end of the night. Everyone's going home.'
"But they took it as an insult. They came at us with knives," Woods told the paper.
The News reported that the killer was pushed off the train at 14th Street. The New York Times reported that he left the train with his group of friends at Christopher Street. Police caught up to the injured men at the Houston Street station. The 2 train was running local this weekend.
"He got stabbed over nonsense," Morel's mother, Florence Kwiatkowski, told the Post. "He would be the one to put peace to things."
The New York Times reported that two men were being questioned by police in connection to the stabbing, but the News said they had since been released.
The stabbings come as murder in Manhattan has jumped 78 percent in the opening weeks of 2010.
Police statistics show there have been 16 murders in Manhattan over the first 11 weeks of the year compared to just nine over the same span in 2009, an increase of 77.8 percent.
