New Yorker stabbed by stranger in unprovoked attack in Manhattan

Police said a 61-year-old woman was left covered in blood after she was stabbed by a stranger on a street in Midtown, Manhattan, on Wednesday afternoon.

The victim was on West 57th Street and Seventh Avenue around 3:40 pm when the stranger stabbed her twice in the right shoulder, police said.

The woman, whose name has not been released, was taken to Roosevelt Hospital in a stable condition.

Her blood was seen on the sidewalk outside the USA Brooklyn Diner two blocks south of Central Park.

Construction worker José Valencia, 30, was installing scaffolding when a bleeding woman ran up to him and his colleagues.

“She was just scared,” he said. “We heard a loud scream and she ran up to the guys working on the scaffolding… So she started looking at her hands. Blood flowed down her right arm.”

She said she was “just accidentally stabbed.”

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He gave her a rag to wrap around her hand.

“There was blood and she bled a lot, but she was fine,” he said.

“At first she didn’t even know she was bleeding,” he said. “She felt that something was wrong, and then she saw the blood flowing down her shirt, down her arm. The whole shirt she was wearing was pretty much stained with blood. It was then that she saw that she had a stab wound.

Valencia said the man with the knife “approached her by accident. It’s as if I walked past you and stabbed you in the arm – that’s pretty much what happened.”

The assailant was last seen running down West 57th Street toward Eighth Avenue. He was wearing an orange hooded shirt.

The attack stunned nearby workers.

“A person who walks around and stabs is dangerous,” said the doorman who worked across the street from the stabbing site. “The city is getting dangerous. It’s getting dangerous everywhere in New York.”