NYPD is looking for three people believed to be involved in the murder of Daevon Silva, the 23-year-old attacked with a baseball bat and then stabbed near Times Square in the early hours of Monday. The attack took place just after one night, at the height of West 49th Street and Seventh Avenue, one of the busiest areas in the area, where Silva – resident in Rhode Island – was hit on his back and thigh. He moved to the hospital, died shortly after. The circumstances of the dispute have not been clarified and, according to NYPD, no arrests yet arise.
This is the second murder recorded in the area within two days. On Sunday morning, in fact, around 4.15, Gibson Winters, 39 years old, had been reached by gunshots near West 46th Street and Twelfth Avenue. The man was struck in the back and in the groin and taken to the hospital, where he died shortly after. Even in this case the investigations are still in progress and there are no stopped people. The two facts are not linked, but their temporal proximity has attracted the attention of the authorities.
Times Square is part of the Midtown South district, an area where violent crimes are monitored with particular attention due to the continuous influx of residents, workers and, above all, tourists. According to the latest CompStat data, the murders in the district remain relatively rare compared to other New York neighborhoods: in 2023, five were recorded, slightly increasing compared to the four of the previous year, numbers however much lower than the peaks of the nineties, when the area exceeded the twenty annual victims. At the same time, the district has seen an increase in crimes, such as physical assaults and burglaries, while shootings remain on lower incidence levels thanks also to the constant presence of the police and controls at the main points of the area, including the Times Square–42 Street station, one of the most frequented of the urban system.
In recent years the area has often been the subject of special attention by the city administrations for safety management: Times Square is stable among the most visited places in the United States, with estimates ranging between 250 and 300 thousand passes per day. Insulated episodes such as the murders of the last two days are usually analyzed in the overall picture of the city trends, which show a drop in the murders at the city level from 2021, but significant variations between different neighborhoods.
L’articolo Two murders in two days near Times Square proviene da IlNewyorkese.
