A New York City man is expected to be charged with hate crimes on Monday after he allegedly yelled “Free Palestine!” before stabbing a man outside a Brooklyn synagogue over the weekend, police said.
The New York Police Department told Fox News Digital that the incident involving 22-year-old suspect Vincent Sumpter occurred around 2 a.m. Saturday near the world headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Police said the 33-year-old victim was “slashed in the torso” after an argument in which the younger suspect uttered the words “Liberate Palestine.” The victim was taken to a local hospital in stable condition, but Sumpter was arrested and charged with assault as a hate crime and assault causing serious bodily injury.
Yaakov Behrman, a rabbi and spokesman for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, He told the New York Times The victims were Jewish.
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A stabbing incident was captured on video in New York City’s Crown Heights neighborhood last weekend. (Crown Heights Schmira Public Safety)
“This was obviously a very serious incident and there was a lot of anti-Semitic rhetoric,” Bearman told the paper. “Sadly, I’m concerned that if this rhetoric doesn’t stop, we’re going to start seeing it happen more frequently.”
Security camera footage from the scene shows two men in white shirts speaking with a third person, who then lunges at the other men, forcing them to retreat.
“He started saying things like ‘Free Palestine’. His two friends came a little closer and told him to go away,” said a person described as a friend of the victim. CBS New York, He noted that they had just finished a Friday night Shabbat meal when the stabbing occurred.
“Then after a few minutes he said: ‘Do you want to die? What’s going on?’ We said we don’t want anybody to die, go away and we’re calling the police. It only took a split second but then I took the knife and cut him open like that and stabbed him in the stomach,” he added.
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The NYPD said the suspect was heard yelling “Liberate Palestine” just before the stabbing. (Crown Heights Schmira Public Safety)
Witnesses told CBS New York that local residents chased the suspect until police arrived.
“I had internal bleeding, but I thank God it was a miracle,” the victim told Israel’s Kan 11 News. New York Post.
Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, wrote to X after the stabbing, “This is a dangerous escalation of the current situation we face, and all New Yorkers should be outraged, because this is an attack on all New Yorkers.”
It shows people retreating after a suspect attacked them in Brooklyn early Saturday morning. (Crown Heights Schmira Public Safety)
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“This abhorrent and abhorrent attack on a young Jewish man in Brooklyn because of his identity should not and cannot be viewed in isolation,” he added.
