A terrifying spray of bullets on a train beneath Brooklyn. The murder of a Chinese food delivery man over a dearth of duck sauce. The shocking stabbing death of a married Queens mom by her handyman lover.
The headline-making cases were among the most stunning of 2022 across the boroughs, in a year where the city homicide rate dropped 13%, from 481 in 2021 to 418 heading into New Year’s Day 2023. The victims ran the gamut of New Yorkers, with the motives sometimes hard to fathom and the suspects targeting victims they knew intimately — or not at all.
The city was first shocked in February when a homeless stalker followed Christina Lee, 35, into her Chinatown apartment building before stabbing the helpless victim more than 40 times with a knife taken from her kitchen, cops said.
The woman, targeted in a sexually-motivated attack, was still screaming when police arrived, with accused killer Assamad Nash mimicking a woman’s voice to say all was well inside when cops knocked on the door. The blood-soaked suspect tried to flee down an apartment fire escape before cops broke in to put him in handcuffs.
In early March, cops arrested an 83-year-old serial killer after discovering a severed head wrapped inside a plastic bag at his Brooklyn apartment. Police were looking to question Harvey Marcelin after finding the victim’s limbless torso inside a shopping cart on a borough street, and authorities said the suspect had already done time for killing a pair of girlfriends in Manhattan.
One was shot in 1963, the other stabbed barely a year after his 1984 release on lifetime parole.
The nation’s largest city and its capital were both rocked in the same month by a meticulous and merciless killer accused in the slayings of homeless men in Washington, D.C., and Manhattan — apparently taking the train between the cities on his mission of mayhem between March 3 and March 12.
Two sleeping victims were fatally shot, with suspect Gerald Brevard III arrested March 15 in the spree where three other homeless men survived their wounds from an assailant wearing a mask and blue surgical gloves.
“Just going up and shooting somebody sleeping, defenseless on the sidewalk ... (he) has some serious issues,” said NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig.
The city was rocked again in April, this time by an unhinged shooter wearing a gas mask and carrying smoke bombs on a northbound N train under Brooklyn. Frank James, 62, wore an orange and green construction vest as he sprayed the morning rush hour train with bullets from a 9mm handgun, leaving 10 straphangers wounded and another 13 injured in the chaos.
The hulking James offered a two-word warning before pulling the trigger: “Start running.” He was arrested after a 30-hour manhunt, and his lawyers recently said the suspect intends to plead guilty in the case.
A Queens love triangle ended on the wrong end of a knife for a mother of two stabbed 58 times by her spurned lover after trying to break off their relationship in the basement of her home. Handyman David Bonola, 44, quickly confessed to the savage April 16 attack on Orsolya Gaal, a blond Hungarian immigrant, with police alleging he repeatedly plunged a steak knife into her neck and upper body.
The victim’s younger son slept upstairs as Bonola carved up the corpse, loaded the body parts into the boy’s hockey bag dragged it and dumped the remains in a local park. Bonola pleaded guilty and was sentenced in November to 25 years in prison for the crime.
The city’s most bizarre homicide followed two weeks later. A Chinese restaurant delivery man, a married father of three, was gunned down by a customer irate over the lack of duck sauce with his order, police said. The killing was sparked by a months-long dispute over the condiment, and Glenn Hisch, 51, was arrested weeks later for the April 30 slaying.
The so-called “Duck Sauce” killer committed suicide before going to trial for the homicide.
A straphanger’s worst nightmare became reality when an ex-con still on parole randomly gunned down a Goldman Sachs researcher riding in the last car of a Manhattan-bound Q train, headed to a May 22 brunch with his brother. The subway was pulling into the Canal St. station in Manhattan when suspect Andrew Abdullah, 25, stopped his pacing inside the car and opened fire on the unsuspecting Daniel Enriquez, 44, cops said.
“Every New Yorker’s worst nightmare,” said first-year NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell. The suspect was arrested two days later after his request for a personal surrender to Mayor Eric Adams was turned down.
A homeless Manhattan man’s July stabbing spree targeted three fellow homeless men, with prosecutors alleging suspect Trevon Murphy deliberately chose a serrated blade to inflict the maximum damage on his victims.
“It was his ‘stabber’s choice’” to plunge the blade into his targets’ abdomen, said Assistant District Attorney Shilpa Kaira at a court hearing where she declared Murphy, 40, had confessed to the stabbings and offered details of the crimes. All the victims were sleeping when stabbed, with one man killed and the other two wounded.
The suspect was nabbed when an eagle-eyed retired correction officer spotted the suspect, who was wearing an “Innocence Project” hoodie.
One of the year’s most chilling attacks targeted a Queens mother of two on her way to work at JFK Airport as a security guard in the early morning hours of Sept. 20. Elizabeth Gomes, 33, was viciously beaten, with oft-arrested suspect Waheed Foster smashing the victim with a bottle, pummeling the helpless woman with his fists and slamming her head against a wall inside the airport subway stop in the caught-on-video beating.
“I wasn’t trying to kill her,” Foster told The New York Daily News in a jailhouse interview at Rikers Island. “I was just trying to give her a real good ass whooping ... If I stomped her in the face, she’d be dead.”
The November arrest of a fugitive suspect accused of fatally stabbing and dismembering his girlfriend inside her Brooklyn apartment ended a manhunt for Justin Williams, charged with murder and concealment of a human corpse. The remains of victim D’Asia Johnson were cut into pieces and stuffed inside a pair of suitcases.
The victim was stabbed nine times — five in the chest, and four in the back — after she returned home from work on Aug. 21, prosecutors said.
Authorities said Williams, 24, stayed inside the apartment with the body parts for a month after the killing, with the defendant trying to mask the stench with towels and cleaning products before going on the lam, cops said.
