A 51-year-old man stabbed two people in broad daylight in the vicinity of Central Park on the Upper West Side in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon before being taken into custody, the police said.
The assailant, identified as Raul Morales, attacked the two men in separate incidents on Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue at around 1:30 p.m., leaving them wounded, the police said. Both were expected to survive.
Mr. Morales first walked up to a 57-year-old man on West 84th and Central Park West and stabbed him in the back with a knife, according to a spokesman for the Police Department. He then went to West 86th Street and Amsterdam, the spokesman said, where he approached another man, this time stabbing him in the torso with a screwdriver.
It was not immediately clear what led to the midday attack in the heart of the Upper West Side, a residential neighborhood with low crime rates. But on Thursday, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that Mr. Morales had yelled “Allahu akbar” as he attacked both men, according to accounts from the victims and witnesses.
Ms. Tisch said that the department was evaluating whether the stabbings had been intended as hate crimes and that detectives were still investigating Mr. Morales’s motive. While Mr. Morales did not have a history of mental health issues documented with the department, she added, it appeared that his mental state might have played a role in the attacks.
The first victim was identified as a 57-year-old Asian man, Chok Sung, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter. The second victim was Moshe Yezhak Grunhaus, a 50-year-old Jewish man, the official said.
Mr. Grunhaus had been at The Jewish Center nearby on 86th Street for Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem, said Rabbi Yosie Levine. Initially, Rabbi Levine was told that there had been a stabbing nearby, and he warned members of the synagogue to be careful when leaving. He later found out that one of the victims had left the synagogue not long before.
Both men were taken by emergency medical workers to Mount Sinai Morningside.
Hate crimes in New York City, particularly those targeting Jewish people, have risen in recent years, even as other major crimes have declined. As of the start of July, the number of confirmed hate crimes in 2026 had risen nearly 8 percent to 322 from the same period a year earlier, according to data provided by the Police Department.
On Wednesday, the day before the Manhattan stabbings, the police were investigating two separate hate crimes in Brooklyn and Queens, involving anti-Muslim statements and an assault in which the assailant made antisemitic remarks.
About half the attacks this year targeted Jewish people, making antisemitic violence the largest share of hate crimes in the city. In the same period, the department recorded 33 attacks against people based on their sexual orientation and 10 against Asian New Yorkers.
Following Mr. Morales’s arrest on Thursday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has angered some Jewish New Yorkers with his longstanding criticism of Israel, condemned the stabbings.
“These hateful and despicable attacks have no place in our city,” the mayor said. He echoed Ms. Tisch’s statements that Mr. Morales’s mental health may have been a factor and that the crimes were still being evaluated.
But the episode was quick to draw outrage from several Jewish elected officials, who said the attacks appeared to be antisemitic, even as the Police Department had yet to determine a motive. Their swift responses seemed to reflect an anxiety among Jewish leaders in the city over antisemitic violence, particularly as criticism of Israel grows in the United States.
In a statement on Thursday night, the UJA-Federation of New York, a leading Jewish organization, said, “We’re horrified — but not surprised — by today’s brutal attacks on the Upper West Side.”
The statement referred scathingly to Mayor Mamdani, who earlier this week said that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was a war criminal. “These attacks came soon after Mayor Mamdani once again used his official platform to viciously attack Israel, the only Jewish state,” it said. “We cannot ignore the dangerous climate created when elected leaders relentlessly portray Israel — and by extension the many Jewish New Yorkers who feel a deep connection to it — as uniquely evil and illegitimate.”
After the stabbings, Mr. Morales walked to his home in a New York City Housing Authority building on Amsterdam Avenue, according to a second law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter. He went inside his apartment on the 11th floor, and was later taken into custody there by officers in the Emergency Service Unit.
Belkis Amador, 61, who lives in the apartment next door to Mr. Morales, said he barely said a word since moving in six months ago to live with her longtime neighbor.
She said she would run into him in the mornings, as he was returning from his night shift as a security guard.
“He never talks at all. I would say ‘good morning’ in the elevator, and he would say nothing,” she said.
Marianna Ellenberg, a professor, said she was taking her father to a doctor’s appointment in the neighborhood on Thursday afternoon when she came across the aftermath of the stabbing. As their car turned from 84th Street onto Central Park West, Ms. Ellenberg said she looked out the window to see a man “standing still like a statue” with something sticking out of his body.
Maayan Weinberg, 26, was walking near Amsterdam Avenue and West 86th Street when she saw a man hunched over and on his knees.
Thursday was the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av, and Ms. Weinberg, who noticed the man’s skullcap, said, “I had assumed he had collapsed from fasting.” She added, “But then I saw he was holding napkins to his chest, he was bleeding, and there was a bunch of people around him.
“He was alarmingly still. It looked like he was in a state of shock,” she said.
Two minutes later, paramedics arrived on the scene.
Michael Jacobs and Morris Dahan, who are members of Manhattan Shomrim, a voluntary neighborhood patrol group, said they were called to the neighborhood by a bystander and arrived to find Mr. Grunhaus lying wounded on the ground.
“He was on the floor with a screwdriver in his chest,” Mr. Dahan said. He and Mr. Jacobs called 911 immediately
Miles G. Cohen and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
