California College Town rocked by stabbings that remain a mystery
A quiet college town in Northern California has been rocked by a series of stabbings that left two people dead and a third seriously injured in less than a week.
Police in Davis, California, a community of about 70,000 people west of Sacramento, have been asking for the public’s help since a 50-year-old man was found dead with stab wounds in the city’s Central Park on Thursday. Two days later, a University of California, Davis student was stabbed to death in another park.
The latest attack occurred on Monday evening, seriously injuring a woman sleeping in a homeless camp near the railway just east of downtown. On an 911 call shortly before midnight, the woman told dispatchers she had been stabbed through the wall of her tent. Witnesses reported seeing a man flee. The woman was hospitalized on Tuesday and is in critical but stable condition.
It remains unclear whether all three attacks were committed by the same person, police said, but descriptions from witnesses to the most recent two stabbings match. Authorities are looking for a thin, curly-haired young man, between five and five feet tall, who is wearing a dark sweatshirt and black Adidas pants.
Monday night’s stabbing led to a shelter in town and on the UC Davis campus that lasted until just before dawn on Tuesday when officers searched the community’s streets and yards with drones and police dogs, said Lieutenant Dan Beckwith, a spokesman from the Davis Police Department.
Manslaughter is “extremely rare” in Davis, Lieutenant Beckwith said. This is according to data from the police website last murder within the city limits happened during an incident of domestic violence in late 2019.
“I’ve been with the department for 40 years now,” Davis police chief Darren Pytel said at a news conference Tuesday, urging the public to be vigilant after dark and not venture into dimly lit areas alone . “This is different.”
The first attack killed 50-year-old David Henry Breaux, a Stanford University graduate who slept outside and undertook a years-long project as “Compassion Guy,” asking the public for definitions of compassion, often at the popular farmers’ market in the park where he was found dead. Lt. Beckwith said a passerby at the park, which is a short walk from campus, discovered Mr. Breaux’s lifeless body slumped on a bench at 11:20 a.m. Thursday. Emergency services determined that he had died from multiple stab wounds.
Saturday’s attack killed 20-year-old Karim Abou-Najm senior who studied computer science at UC Davis and had just posted excitedly on social media about his research and his graduation this spring.
The son of a faculty member, Mr. Najm, was killed at 9:14 p.m. in Sycamore Park, in a residential area also a short distance from campus, the lieutenant said.
“A resident had heard a disturbance in the park and when they went to look they found the victim on a concrete bike path and saw a man fleeing,” he said. “The attack was similar in nature – very brutal – and the victim was stabbed several times.”
The witness to that attack had exchanged brief words with the attacker and worked with detectives to prepare a police sketch, Chief Pytel said.
The successive attacks have stunned Davis, an affluent, liberal community about 15 miles from the capital known for its public schools, civic activism and extensive network of bike paths. “This is a town where people know each other,” Lieutenant Beckwith said.
“Everyone is concerned and scared and completely in shock,” said Lucas Frerichs, Yolo County supervisor and former mayor of Davis.
“David Breaux was loved,” he said, searching for words to describe the community’s trauma. “He was probably one of the most peaceful, gentle people you’ll ever meet. Karim Abou-Najm – also peaceful and gentle. And promising. He grew up here. And a homeless woman, so vulnerable. And the violence of these attacks.”
Lieutenant Beckwith said crime scene evidence was being processed and that the FBI and California Department of Justice had been brought in to assist in the investigation, along with other police and sheriff’s departments in Sacramento and Yolo counties, including campus police.
“We are all hands on deck,” he said.