On Sunday morning, 28-year-old man attacked his 23-year-old wife with a meat cleaver in Chinatown. Luckily, there were two members of the FDNY on hand to intervene, but it was still pretty gruesome. Firefighter José Ortiz told the New York Post that he was at his Canal Street station on Sunday morning when he noticed the woman screaming and crying as her husband dragged her down the block. As he moved to approach the couple, the man pulled out the giant knife and stabbed his wife in the head and stomach “six, eight, maybe ten times.” Ortiz and fellow firefighter James Trainor responded by “bum rushing” the attacker, who they managed to pin against a fence.
Meanwhile, the disoriented and terrified victim ran away, leaving behind her shoes and “clumps of bloody hair.” A third firefighter, Shane Clarke, and some neighborhood cops ended up chasing the woman for several blocks before finally catching up with her Division and Eldridge Streets. “She was running down the street screaming, ‘Help!’” said a witness, who saw her briefly duck into a noodle shop. “She was barefoot and went into the restaurant and then ran back out. There was blood on the window … It was pretty weird.” Clarke concurred: “Besides the World Trade Center, this was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” he told the New York Daily News.
Police officials say that the woman was taken to Bellevue, where she is in “critical but stable” condition. Her husband was arrested at the awful-sounding scene.
