By Ben Fractenberg and Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo Reporter/Producers
WEST VILLAGE — As police continue to search for leads in the brutal subway stabbing deaths of two men over the weekend, the fiancée of one of the victims expressed fear that the killer remains on the loose.
“It scares me,” said a tearful Lory Taylor, 23, who at times worried for victim Darnell Morel’s safety in New York and wanted him to move to Florida to be with her. “Who’s to say that if [the killer] did that to him, they wouldn’t do it to someone else?”
Morel and his friend Ricardo Williams, both 24 and from Brooklyn, were left to die on a downtown 2 train after an unidentified attacker stabbed them and injured another man as the group returned from a night out in Midtown. The assailant had apparently been retaliating after being hit by trash one of the men threw out of the train, reports indicated.
Police were still struggling to find video surveillance footage of the suspect on Tuesday. The investigation has been complicated by the fact that are no security cameras installed at the Christopher Street station and no station agents are posted at the underground location.
New Yorkers responded to the news with their own concerns regarding subway security in the seemingly safe neighborhood where the killer apparently fled.
“If there were video cameras at the station they might have been able to catch him,” said Claude Haynes, 68, who works at a dry-cleaning shop at Christopher and Bedford streets a few blocks from the Christopher Street subway station, where police believe the assailant escaped from after the stabbing.
“There needs to be a camera in the station, especially in the morning, because there’s nobody in the booth and that’s dangerous,” added Adele Acosca, 59, from the Bronx, who gets off the train at the Christopher Street station daily for work. “Maybe somebody would have called 911 quicker or gotten in touch with the dispatcher.”
For some, the incident proved a sobering reminder that violence can erupt in any situation.
“It freaked me out when I heard about it,” said Xeno Chirchi, 20, of the West Village, standing on the station’s downtown platform. “I’ll probably look a little more over my shoulder when I’m on my way to work.”
Khali Ali, 29, who lives in Midtown and works at a deli on Christopher and Washington streets, was surprised to hear the incident spilled over into one of Manhattan’s nicer neighborhoods.
“It’s unbelievable, especially because it happened downtown,” he said. “People pay more money in rent downtown because it’s supposed to be safer.”
Morel, who called to tell his fiancée he loved her just hours before he died, had been planning a move to Taylor's hometown of Orlando to be with her.
“I always knew it would be better to start over somewhere else,” said Taylor, who had come to New York only days before the incident to visit Morel. “I didn’t think it would get to the point where he would lose his life.”
The brutality and apparent impulsiveness of the attack was enough to make her question how safe the city actually is.
“It’s really shocking to me,” Taylor said. “He’s always been the one to try to avoid problems in situations like this.”
Now she has to decide whether she is prepared to return to New York — this time for her fiancé’s funeral.
“I want to go,” Taylor said, “but I don’t want to face the fact that he’s really gone."
