A man stabbed two people, one fatally, inside a restaurant during a violent string of attacks on Friday at a shopping plaza in Austin, Texas, that began with an assault at a coffee shop and ended with the suspect leaping off a roof, police said.
The attacks on a busy downtown avenue of restaurants and apartments just south of the Texas Capitol terrified customers stopping for their morning coffee on the way to work. It was the city of Austin’s first homicide of this year.
It began when the alleged attacker, who police only identified as a 27-year-old male, struck a person inside the coffee shop “for no apparent reason,” Austin police said.
Photo: AP
He then fled a few doors down to Freebirds World Burrito, where he stabbed two people before escaping to the roof and jumping.
By Friday night, police said the wounded person was in stable, but serious condition, and the suspect was in critical condition.
“This guy out of nowhere just hit him in the back of the head with something,” said Stacy Romine, 33, who was getting her drink at Bennu Coffee when she saw the attack at a table full of regulars.
“People tried to restrain him and stop him from leaving the store after it happened. But he could not be apprehended by three men, including a police officer,” Romine said.
Authorities said both stabbing victims worked at the restaurant.
Emergency responders described the person who died as a man in his 20s.
Hours after the attack, Texas Governor Greg Abbott speculated on Twitter that the attacker was homeless with a criminal record, fanning an ongoing feud with Austin’s liberal leaders over people living on the streets.
However, police have publicly offered few details on the suspect and Abbott’s spokesman John Wittman would not comment beyond the governor’s tweet.
Last year, Austin relaxed ordinances on public camping, a move that made homelessness more visible downtown.
Abbott has previously shared videos that he claims captures the dangers of the new policy, but they include videos criticized as misleading, including one of a man whose attorney later said was not homeless and suffered from mental illness.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler on Friday night said that he did not know the stabbing suspect’s housing situation, but called the governor’s tweet disappointing, saying it suggested that homeless people are dangerous.
“It’s harmful to a community when we demonize people like that falsely, misleading. There’s a real price,” Adler said.
In 2017, one student was killed and three others wounded in a random stabbing attack at the University of Texas campus in Austin.
In that case, the assailant was later found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema