Global Courant 2023-05-04 10:21:56
DAVIS, California –
Amid a series of brutal and seemingly random stabbings that left two men dead and a woman in critical condition, life in Davis goes on as if under curfew.
In a city normally bustling with bikers and joggers on nearly every street and trail, the parks bursting with the sights and sounds of youth sports, city life is suddenly eerily quiet.
The unease began Thursday with the fatal stabbing of a well-known town figure, 50-year-old David Henry Breaux, a Stanford University graduate who slept in the city’s Central Park and was known for his gentle proselytizing of the need for human compassion. Two days later, on Saturday night, UC Davis student Karim Abou Najm, 20, was savagely stabbed and killed at around 9:15 p.m. in Sycamore Park in a residential neighborhood near campus as he biked home from an event at the university.
Then, Monday night, a homeless woman in her 60s was attacked while sleeping near 2nd and L streets on the edge of downtown. She was stabbed through the canvas of her tent and transported to UC Davis Medical Center, where she remains in critical condition.
Witnesses to the third stabbing described the assailant as a 5-5-foot tall man with curly hair and a thin build, wearing a black or blue sweatshirt, black Adidas pants with white stripes, and black shoes and with a brown backpack. A witness responding to distress calls in Sycamore Park after Abou Najm was stabbed gave a similar physical description of the attacker fleeing that crime scene.
On Wednesday afternoon, Davis police arrested a man with long, wavy dark hair, wearing black Adidas pants with a white stripe, after a resident saw him wandering Sycamore Park and noted the resemblance to the witness descriptions. A police spokesman said the young man was being held as a person of interest; video from a KCRA news helicopter shows the man, who was not handcuffed, getting into a police car. As of Wednesday evening, he had not yet been arrested and authorities gave no further details.
Around the same time he was detained, Majdi Abou Najm, Karim Abou Najm’s father, stood a few blocks away in Sycamore Park at the spot where his son had been killed. A shrine had sprung up on the grass next to the bike path, with more flowers every day. The elder Abou Najm, a professor at UC Davis, told a passerby that he has visited the site daily since his son was killed, talking to those who leave flowers.
UC Davis announced Wednesday that it was raising money for a student research award in the name of Karim Abou Najm.
Elsewhere in the city, the streets became even more deserted as the sun went down.
The city’s popular Little League has canceled its evening games. UC Davis has canceled evening classes and some professors have even moved their daytime classes online because students fear leaving their dorms.
Meanwhile, numerous businesses in the city have announced that they will close their doors earlier or not open at all. The city’s famed farmers’ market called off its fruit stands and food trucks on Wednesday. And people who usually feel so safe in Davis that they haven’t locked their homes in months are now digging in drawers, looking for their keys.
Police, assisted by the FBI and homicide detectives from around the region, were visibly present Wednesday but reported little on their investigation. A statement from the Davis Police Department about half an hour after authorities apprehended the young man in black Adidas pants did not mention the incident.
Police said detectives were “reviewing numerous tips and leads” and that they had collected biological evidence from crime scenes and were analyzing “early returns”. They also warned that “a lot of inaccurate information and images of bogus suspects have been shared across various social media platforms.”
After consulting witnesses to the second and third attacks, police said they did not have the finer details needed to create a reliable sketch of the suspect. “A sketch illustrating a misleading representation of a suspect,” the department release said, “could lead to the false apprehension of an innocent person.”
