NEW YORK (AP) – Tony-award winning playwright David Henry Hwang was carrying groceries down a Brooklyn street when he felt like he got hit in the back of the head. He suddenly couldn’t walk straight.
“I kept veering into a wall, then a parked car. And that’s when I realized I was bleeding,” Hwang, the author of “M. Butterfly,” said this week.
Hwang had been slashed with a blade by someone who came out of nowhere. The wound was so deep it severed an artery leading to his brain.
He isn’t the only victim of such an unusual crime. Since December, about a dozen such random, unprovoked slashings have been reported across the city, including three this week on subway trains. All were committed by strangers, police said. They used knives, razors and, in one instance, possibly a machete.
Police say the spate of attacks is largely a coincidence. Investigators believe they were committed by different, unconnected people. But the sheer randomness of the crimes has reinforced old fears about safety in a city of strangers.