Residents of the California university town of Davis are mourning the loss of a man they say was known for spreading compassion and love to anyone he came across.
David Breaux, dubbed “Compassion Guy” by his neighbors, was stabbed to death on the morning of 27 April on the same park bench he sat on for years, lending an ear and his heart to people who would talk with him.
“He’s always been the kindest and sweetest person. He tried to be in a state of pure love and was offering these lessons, this time on the [park] bench,” Maria Breaux, David’s older sister, said.
Breaux’s killing was one of three recent stabbings that have rocked the city of Davis, a university town about 15 miles (24km) from California’s state capital, Sacramento. On 30 April, Karim Abou Najm, a 20-year-old student at the University of California, Davis, was found stabbed to death in Sycamore Park. The next day someone stabbed a woman through the tent in which she was living in the city’s downtown area. She survived the attack and is in critical condition.
Police have yet to definitively link the stabbings to one another. Still, the attacks have sparked fear in the small college town. Amid concern and conjecture about these stabbings being the work of a serial killer, there has been an outpouring of condolences and disbelief over Breaux’s death.
“I’ve had incredible support from people in the Davis community who were strangers and now I feel like they’re family,” Maria, 54, said.
The children of a Jamaican mother and French-Creole father, she and David grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Duarte, a city 18 miles north-east of Los Angeles. The siblings had a rough upbringing but were incredibly close, Maria recalls. They both attended Stanford University, and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after graduating. While living in the region, Breaux watched a Ted Talk entitled My Wish: The Charter for Compassion by Karen Armstrong and had an epiphany, according to Maria.
Breaux would go to Lake Merritt in Oakland to ask people for their insights on what compassion means, she explained, thoughts he wrote down in one of the many notebooks he would collect over the next decade. He moved to Davis in 2009 and set up shop in the city’s Central Park to do his “compassion work” full time, his sister said. “It was always the same question: ‘What is your definition of compassion?’ He started collecting these notebooks over time and became a fixture in the community,” Maria added.
Breaux published a book entitled Compassion: A Compilation of Concepts on Compassion in 2010 and was invited to speak in different cities about the importance of compassion.
The last time Maria saw her younger brother was in mid-July 2019. She, her partner and her daughter visited him in Davis after someone let her know that Breaux was without housing. Maria was worried but her brother told her that he was OK.
“I’ve always been his big sister who wanted to protect him. David wanted to be outside and in the community and we had to honor his mission. In retrospect, I should have pushed more, but I wanted to give him a sense of agency – he was a grown-ass man,” Maria said jokingly of her brother.
In the days following her brother’s killing, Maria says she’s been refreshing the news sites every hour to see if police have made any arrests in the recent spate of stabbings. She hopes the person who stabbed her brother will be arrested so no one else gets hurt, but wants to somehow show the same compassion that Breaux worked to spread to the person who took his life. It’s an idea that came from Breaux himself back in 2016 when he asked his family to forgive any who may harm him.
“I want somehow to communicate with that person in a safe way, I want them to know what love is, I wanna know their story,” she said. “I wanna somehow send some message of ‘it’s OK’ to that person, even if they become incarcerated.”
