Elias Abuelazam: The Multi-State Serial Stabber
Final Flint Attacks
The serial stabber now broke his pattern, and did not attack anyone on July 31, 2010. The violence resumed on Sunday, August 1, 2010, though. That morning two stabbings were reported to the Flint Police Department: an assault on Etwan Wilson, 17, at 2:30 a.m. on Cloverlawn Drive and Basil Lane, and, later, a 25-year-old black male was stabbed at 6:15 a.m. in the 300 block of Bradley Avenue. Wilson, hospitalized from his injuries, would complain that it took the police several days to visit him in the hospital and question him about the attack.
"I want to know why the Flint police never came to question me about anything that night," Wilson said.
The police responded that it was their policy to not speak with a victim immediately after the victim has come out of surgery.
The next two days passed without any stabbings.
However, on Tuesday, August 3, 2010, Arnold Minor, 49, was found stabbed to death less than a mile from his home. He had been visiting his mother's home on Flint's north side and was walking home when he was killed in the area of several of the other attacks. Minor's sister, Stephanie Ward, said that she had offered her brother a ride home but he had declined.
"When they found him, he wasn't far from home," Ward said during a press conference outside Flint City Hall. "He bled to death on the street. You don't know what goes through somebody's mind to do something like that."
Arnold Minor was the second member of his family to have been murdered. An older sister had been killed 26 years earlier; her killer has never been caught.
"We're not going to lose another family member to an unsolved mystery," said relative Kareem Minor.
David Leyton
"We are going to catch this individual," Flint Mayor Dayne Walling said, in response to Kareem Minor, at a press conference attended by Flint Police Chief Alvern Lock and Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton.
Although detectives had been investigating each of the attacks that had occurred in Flint, it was not until after Minor's death, some two months after the attacks began, that a pattern became apparent to them. In concluding that the violent attacks that had occurred throughout the summer were not mere coincidence, police officials nonetheless declined to identify all of the victims they linked to the attacker and would at that time only say that the attacks dated back to May 24.
"Citizens of this community have been the victims of a series of unprovoked attacks," Leyton said. "These assaults may be related....These stabbings have been taking place during the early morning hours. The victims have been on foot, and approached by the suspect in his vehicle. Oftentimes, the suspect is asking for directions or assistance."
Mayor Walling urged city residents to remain vigilant and to look out for each other.
"[If] you have someone in your life who is vulnerable, look out for them," Walling said.