On Wednesday afternoon, Raul Morales walked up to a 57-year-old man he had never met before in Manhattan and stabbed him once in the back with a knife.
Then he walked four blocks north.
At West 86th and Amsterdam Avenue, he drove a screwdriver into the chest of a 50-year-old man he'd never seen before. After the second attack, he ditched the screwdriver and barricaded himself inside an apartment building, where police arrested him.
Both victims — one Asian, one Jewish — were taken to Mt. Sinai-St. Luke's Hospital. Neither had ever met Morales. Neither had ever met each other.
Witnesses and victims told investigators the same thing: Morales was screaming "Allahu Akbar" during both attacks.
Morales is 51 years old. He has seven prior arrests.
This happened in the middle of the afternoon, on a busy street, in one of the most expensive zip codes in America. The Upper West Side is the kind of neighborhood New York City points to when it wants to argue the city has turned a corner. Central Park West. Prewar co-ops. Farmer's markets. Safe.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch confirmed the incident was being "evaluated as a potential hate crime." Witnesses heard the same phrase twice, from the same man, directed at two different strangers with nothing in common except their apparent ethnicity and religion. It is not clear what more straightforward evidence would look like. The evaluation is ongoing.
Tisch also offered the city's initial explanation for a man who just stabbed two strangers in broad daylight: "Mental health may be a factor."
NYPD's own records show Morales had no known mental health history.
After the second stabbing, he was collected enough to ditch the screwdriver and barricade himself in a building — not a man in the grip of an uncontrollable episode. A man making decisions. The city reached for the one explanation that asks nothing of the system — for a man whose own file doesn't support it. No diagnosis. No history. Just the standard language that ends the inquiry, softens the Islamic jihadist narrative, and makes the next part of the news cycle easier to manage.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the attacks "horrifying" and thanked the NYPD for their swift response. The gratitude is touching. The man the NYPD had to arrest walked through that same city's justice system seven times before he showed up on the Upper West Side on a Wednesday afternoon with a knife and a screwdriver.
Seven arrests means seven times a judge, a prosecutor, or a parole system made a decision about Raul Morales and sent him back. Seven times the city of New York had paperwork on this man and concluded he was someone else's problem. Two strangers on a Wednesday afternoon found out whose problem he actually was.
Both men are expected to survive. Morales is in custody. The city is evaluating its options. The mental health excuse is already in circulation.
The mayor says it's horrifying. He's right. It is. It was also preventable — seven times over.
