Sad day in NYC as a Barnard freshman was stabbed to death steps away from
the campus yesterday during an attempted robbery. According to news reports, she was stabbed multiple times in Morningside Park, approximately 75 feet from an empty security guard booth (guard was making rounds). She climbed the steps to the guard booth and lay there for 30 minutes before being found. She was transported to local hospital and pronounced dead.
It appears to have been a group of young men (animals) who are still loose.
Prayers to the family, friends and Barnard community.
Here is a link to the story:
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-stabbing-near-columbia-morningside-heights-20191212-ewofwz5e6jdshjl52dlbyqmyci-story.html
I’m old enough to remember a time when Columbia/Barnard’s location was considered a negative instead of a positive by most prospective applicants. Let’s hope we’re not headed back to those days.
Tragic. Very sad.
One potential 16 year old suspect is in custody after a trail of blood was followed to his apartment.
Reports are conflicting.
One report said that they followed a trail of blood (at night? Through a park scattered with autumn leaves? Wet and dark paths?) to the home of a 16 year old boy and took him into custody.
Other reports, more recent ones, say that no one is in custody.
I don’t understand how. if she was found 30 minutes AFTER the incident, they have any witnesses who can attest that there was a group who attacked her. Where were those witnesses when she needed help to call an ambulance?
Or maybe she told them she’d get to the street on her own – if she didn’t realize how badly she was injured at the time.
It looks like the timeline of the first reports is wrong. There are CU students reporting on school forums that they were at the top of the stairs a little bit after 5pm, and she definitely wasn’t lying there. The 30 minute comment has disappeared from most of the news sites. She got herself out of the park, but was obviously horribly injured. My own daughter has walked thru that park many times to get to the Rite Aid on the other side. At 5:30pm, she would have felt safe doing so. Never again obviously. Regardless, both police and University security will need to increase because right now students are rightfully very upset, and frightened.
@divarose FYI–There is a 24-hour drug store on Broadway and 111th. No need to walk through park for a drug store. The Hartley independent drugstore at 120th and Amsterdam is also quite good–the pharmacist knows each of her clients there.
CU has a shuttle that can take students around the neighborhood to shops. Here’s the map – https://transportation.columbia.edu/content/evening-shuttle#/tmap-478
The shocking thing is that this happened at all.
In most murders in NYC these days the victims were known to the perpetrators (domestic violence, gang/drug/gambling disputes, etc.) and deliberately targeted. The sort of random killing of a stranger during a robbery gone wrong that used to be a common occurrence in New York has become increasingly rare.
Walking in Morningside Park today is significantly safer than walking down 5th Avenue past Tiffany was in most of the 70’s-90’s.
None of this is any comfort (or should be) to the victim’s family or friends.
@Dustyfeathers She has already moved her prescription. So very sad…
Here is a recent statement from CU about the security post. I’m thankful that she wasn’t alone, and that someone tried to help her right away.
Columbia University Statement: “The public safety officer assigned to 116th Street and Morningside Drive was at his post last night when the victim emerged from the park, and he came to her aid immediately upon recognizing that she was injured. Reports to the contrary are inaccurate. Officers stationed at this location do not make rounds that cause them to leave their post.”
This is good to know @divarose
It’s also shocking how badly the news garbles the information. Apparently there was no bloody trail to the door of the young man’s apartment as was previously reported. What seems to have happened is that the police happened to hear that one of the assailants MAY have had a green jacket. In their files they had a previous robbery suspect who also was known to have a green jacket – and they took that poor young man for hours of questions. NYC police are pretty tough cookies and I would not like my child to be questioned for hours by the police, that’s for sure. His parents were present, say many reports, but oh my goodness! What a horrible thing to go through, being a kid and being questioned for hours about a murder that in all probability he had nothing to do with. He was released with no charges.
I live nearby the park and can let you know that helicopters are still hovering overhead. All entrances of the park are taped off and have been since the incident. Police cars with bubble lights on are at the entrances. They see to be treating the entire park as a crime scene. I didn’t want to ghoulishly walk past the actual location of the horrible incident, though, so I can’t report what the scene is there.
This is so sad to hear. This poor girl’s parents now have to drive to NYC to identify her body. I cannot imagine. The horror of it all. The fear she must have experienced as she was being attacked. As we send them off to college we don’t know if they are going to come back to us.
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Terrible. The park has really been considered safe for the last few years, especially in early evening. It is very steep with lots of steps, so I’m not sure how she got herself out. Just so tragic for the victim and the family!
Terrible. I read an article in NEw York Times and it seems the park has been having an uptick in crime - 20 reported robberies since 12/8 - that is crazy.
My S friend is a student and she is very shaken. This family is in my thoughts - just such a tragedy.
And this could happen in any major city in the US.
Looks like an arrest has been made:
https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/tessa-majors-murder-suspect-arrested-in-stabbing-of-barnard-student/
A lot of the reporting on this tragedy has been inaccurate, but let’s hope the cops got the right guy here and that he is off the streets.
Or indeed, in any small city.
Sadly, with 8+ Mio people in NYC or 20+ in the entire Metro area, the accumulation of weekly local incidents can seem worrysome, when one looks are the news covering rural counties of 1/2 Mio people, where you might only see the same number of incidents reported over a whole year.
But in reality, avoiding big cities doesn’t imply added safety, as arson/hate attacks against black churches and other places of worship, school/preschool/church/clinic/… mass shootings, suprimacists plowing cars into demonstrators, or shooting up Walmarts… remind us too frequently, whenever they happen in otherwise relatively “docile” parts of the county.
Some papers are reporting that the person arrested is only 13 years old, which would probably place him in middle school. Unbelievable.
Yes, just saw that. 13. How horrible.
My daughter just got to know Tessa majors about a week ago. Both play bass and are interested in creative writing and journalism. So sad for her loss of a new friend.
In reading various articles and blogs about this tragedy I am struck by a common theme of “How could this happen adjacent to the campus of a prestigious Ivy League university”. As if somehow prestige would guarantee safety. There have been murders on the campuses of Harvard, Yale and Stanford among others. Some were targeted, others were random. And as for big city danger, about 25 years ago a student was murdered inside the main library at Penn State. Her killer was never arrested. And this was in idyllic small town State College, PA.
Have you encouraged her to seek out all the support options on campus? This is very traumatizing for everyone involved. I can’t imagine how her first year seminar classmates must be feeling right now.