Seattle police have charged a 44-year-old ex-con with the stabbing of another man in the stomach from behind in a “seemingly unprovoked attack” in the city’s Chinatown-International District, authorities said, the latest in a string of violent crimes across the U.S. linked to repeat-offender suspects.
Surveillance video appears to show a man on a bicycle approach another man and stab him without warning before running off. The victim, who was pulling a cart along the sidewalk at the time, falls to the ground but eventually gets up and tries to run after the suspect while holding his side.
He couldn’t keep up, but police arrested 44-year-old Jose Francisco Garcia nearby. Court records show he has a rap sheet dating back to at least 1997, when he was convicted of third-degree assault, and he had pending drug charges from November.
In Oregon, he was also convicted of aggravated harassment, criminal mischief, disorderly conduct and other charges.
Firefighters rushed the victim, identified only as a 40-year-old man, to Harborview Medical Center in serious condition.
This still image taken from surveillance video shows the Seattle intersection near the crime scene. Police said their Real Time Crime Center captured the incident on video and that a suspect tried to flee on a bike but was arrested within 9 minutes of the 911 call. (Seattle Department of Transportation)
The stabbing is just one in a string of violent crimes in the Chinatown-International District area, FOX 13 Seattle reported. A man and woman were injured in two separate shootings in the past month.
Then on Monday night, police responded to another shooting in the same neighborhood that left a man dead and another injured.
But Seattle isn’t the only city facing a rash of violence linked to repeat offenders.
In Charlotte last month, Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old with a history of mental illness and more than a dozen prior charges, allegedly stabbed 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska in the neck from behind in an unprovoked attack on a light rail train on Aug. 22, according to authorities.
Iryna Zarutska curls up in fear as a man looms over her during a disturbing attack on a Charlotte, N.C. light rail train. (NewsNation via Charlotte Area Transit System)
Before the attack, he’d been released without bail for a prior misdemeanor charge of allegedly misusing the 911 system.
Zarutska bled to death on a train car full of bystanders. Brown faces first-degree murder in North Carolina as well as a federal charge of committing an act causing death on a mass transportation system.
“It’s an unreasonable activist push to reform the criminal justice system that put most of blue cities in this predicament that, to me, is sad and needs to be corrected, really quick,” Solan said.
