Six Years of Random Attacks on New Yorkers: Every Documented Case Since 2020, and the Records Behind Them

On June 12, 2020, a man shoved a 92-year-old retired schoolteacher into a fire hydrant on Third Avenue, and within a week every paper in the city had printed the number attached to him: 101 prior arrests, or 103, depending on the paper. On August 31, 2026, a woman with no arrest record in New York stabbed Erin Piacenti to death on Seventh Avenue. Those two cases open and close our report. Between them sits every other attack our research could find, on a New Yorker since the start of 2020, in which the victim and the attacker were strangers and the police, a district attorney or two newsrooms called it unprovoked or random, each one dated, linked to its source and, wherever anyone reported it, carrying the attacker’s record.

The records are the reason our report exists. Six years of argument about random violence in New York have run on perhaps a dozen cases, and the dozen are the least representative ones in the file. Of the 276 attackers who were identified, a prior-arrest count was reported for 128. The median was 8. Eighty-seven percent had been arrested before, and 37 of them had been arrested 16 times or more. Yet in five of the seven years, the attacker in the case the city argued about had a thinner reported record than that year’s median, and in three of those years the record was one arrest or none. The famous cases are the exceptions, and the policy fight has been built on the exceptions.

The second half of our report is the NYPD’s own numbers. Felony assault, the charge most of these attacks carry, rose 41.5 percent from 2020 to 2025 and has stayed there, while shootings fell to the lowest counts the department has recorded and murders are at a record low for 2026 so far. But 42 percent of felony assaults are domestic violence, half happen inside a residence, and two-thirds are between people of the same race. The subway, where 45 percent of the documented random attacks happened, is 2 percent of felony assault complaints. A stranger attack is a small piece of the number New Yorkers are afraid of.

TL;DR

• 454 documented random attacks on New Yorkers from January 1, 2020 through September 10, 2026, 35 of them fatal, every one linked to a source in the ledgers below. The count follows coverage: 104 cases in 2021, when every outlet kept a subway tally, and 51 in 2022, a year with more felony assaults.
• The records. Of 128 identified attackers with a reported count, the median had 8 prior arrests; 87 percent had at least one; 37 had 16 or more; 16 had none. Of the 84 whose status at the time was reported, 73 were on a criminal-justice release, under supervision or carrying an open case, and one had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital that morning.
• The famous cases are the outliers. In five of seven years the attacker everyone argued about had a thinner reported record than that year’s median: Brandon Elliot, two arrests and lifetime parole; Martial Simon, two convictions; Brian Dowling, none; Kerri Aherne, one; Pamela Cisneros, none in New York.
• The official line. Felony assault is up 41.5 percent since 2020 and flat since 2025, while shootings sit at a record low and murders at a record low for 2026 so far. Forty-two percent of felony assaults are domestic, half happen in a residence, and the subway is 2 percent of the total.

The count

Between January 1, 2020 and September 10, 2026, our research found 454 attacks that fit its rule. They hurt 564 people and killed 35. The year-by-year ledgers at the bottom of our report hold every one with its source, and the tables under the charts hold the numbers.

The bars count coverage. The ledger holds 104 cases for 2021, when the anti-Asian attacks of that spring and the subway shoves of that fall had every outlet keeping a running tally, and 51 for 2022, a year in which the NYPD recorded 26,230 felony assaults against 23,105 the year before. Coverage moves with the story of the year. So the bars can say how many stranger attacks got documented and what the documented attackers looked like, and they cannot say how many happened.

What they can describe is where and how. Of the 454, 203 happened in the subway system and 213 on a street or sidewalk; 252 were in Manhattan, 96 in Brooklyn, 60 in Queens, 45 in the Bronx and one on Staten Island. The weapon was most often nothing: 145 punches and 80 shoves, against 83 stabbings, 52 slashings and 46 attacks with a bottle, a pipe, a hammer or a cane. Fifteen of the 32 fatal cases were stabbings, five were shoves, four were beatings with fists, and the rest include the Q train shooting that killed Daniel Enriquez in May 2022, the U-Haul that killed YiJie Ye in Bay Ridge in February 2023, and the F train fire that killed Debrina Kawam at Coney Island in December 2024.

Now the NYPD’s numbers for the same six years.

Felony assault is the crime our cases fall into, and the city has not pushed it down. The NYPD complaint file on NYC Open Data records 20,829 felony assault complaints in 2020 and 29,474 in 2025, a rise of 41.5 percent across the six years our report covers. The department’s own year-end tally runs a few hundred higher each year (20,572 to 29,838) because it counts by the date a record was created and picks up late reports; the shape is the same. The line climbed every year from 2020 through 2024 and then stopped climbing. In 2025 the complaint file shows it flat against 2024, and the NYPD’s count shows it up 1.3 percent. The first half of 2026 came in at 14,558 complaints, half a percent below the first half of 2025. Vital City, counting from a later cut of the same file, puts the midyear figure at 14,802, up 0.4 percent, and calls it the sixth consecutive year of increase and 48 percent above 2019.

Felony assault stopped rising in 2025, at a level about 40 percent higher than the city recorded before the pandemic, and has held there through the first half of 2026.

Everything else went the other way. Murders peaked at 488 in 2021 and fell to 309 in 2025, within 17 of the 292 recorded in 2017, the lowest year in the NYPD’s table. Shooting incidents went from 1,562 in 2021 to 688 in 2025, and the first half of 2026 recorded 322, which the department called the fewest for any first half on record. The complaint file undercounts murders against the NYPD’s homicide database (277 against 309 for 2025) and the table under the chart carries both, so nobody has to take the file’s word for it.

Put the two charts together. The city got good at preventing New Yorkers from being shot, and it did not get better at preventing them from being punched or stabbed. Random attacks are counted inside that flat, high felony assault line, and the next two sections show what else is in it.

Who was attacked

Coverage recorded an age for 514 of the 564 people attacked. The median injured victim was 42; the median person killed was 50. One number stands out: 111 victims, 21.6 percent of those with an age, were 65 or older, against 9.7 percent of all felony assault victims in the official file and 17.5 percent of the city, and coverage selects for exactly these victims, so part of that gap is the ledger’s own bias. Seven of the 34 people killed whose age was reported were over 65: Jorge Cornejo, 76, hit in the head in Jamaica Hills in June 2020; Angel Diaz, 79, punched in Boerum Hill that September; Barbara Maier Gustern, 87, the Broadway vocal coach shoved on West 28th Street in March 2022; Hamod Ali Saeidi, 86, shot in the back walking to a mosque in Richmond Hill in July 2023; Chang Wang, 67, stabbed while fishing by the East River in November 2024; Richard Williams, 83, shoved onto the tracks at Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street in March 2026; and Ross Falzone, 76, shoved down the stairs at 18th Street that May. Twenty-six victims were children, from a 2-year-old hit in the face with a suitcase on the Bowery in May 2021 to Caleb Rijos, 14, stabbed on his way to school in Mott Haven in January 2025.

The official file cannot tell you which victims were attacked by strangers. It can tell you who felony assault victims are, and two things stand out.

The first is age. Complaints with a victim aged 65 or older went from 1,348 in 2018 to 2,859 in 2025, up 112 percent while all felony assault rose 44.5 percent, so older New Yorkers went from 6.6 percent of victims to 9.7 percent. The first half of 2026 recorded 1,538 such complaints, up 11.2 percent on the first half of 2025 and up 138 percent on the first half of 2018. On September 2, 2026 the New York Post reported NYPD figures putting assaults on New Yorkers over 65 up 14 percent year over year and up 143 percent against 2018, with what the department called an astronomical 50 percent increase in attackers who target older people within 30 days of a previous attack. The Post did not say which assault charges its figures count, its numbers run through late August, and the complaint file runs through June; the two point the same way.

Now set that against the city’s age mix. People aged 65 and over are 17.5 percent of the city and 9.7 percent of felony assault victims. People aged 25 to 44 are 30.7 percent of the city and 49 percent of victims. An older New Yorker is still assaulted less often than a younger one. What changed is how fast the older group’s number is rising: it is the fastest-rising line in the file.

The second is race, and the file says something the argument about random attacks leaves out. In 2025, Black New Yorkers were 37.8 percent of felony assault victims and 20 percent of the city. Hispanic New Yorkers were 33.5 percent of victims and 28.7 percent of the city. White New Yorkers were 12.6 percent of victims and 30.7 percent of the city; Asian New Yorkers 8.6 percent and 15.2 percent. Men were 55 percent of victims whose sex was recorded. The people most likely to be the victim of a felony assault in New York are Black and Hispanic and between 25 and 44, which is also who the suspects most often are, and the next section says what that means.

Who attacked

An attacker was identified in 276 of the 454 cases, 61 percent, almost always by arrest. Coverage reported an age for 269 of them: the median was 32, the youngest 13 and the oldest 70. Two hundred fifty were men and 23 were women. Coverage said something about mental health for 79 of the 276, and in 74 of those cases it reported a history; it addressed housing for 126, and reported 95 as homeless. Those are counts of what got reported, and a reporter asks about a psychiatric history when the attack looks like one, so the ledger overstates both rates relative to whatever the true rates are. The official file, which asks nothing about either, is the next chart.

The NYPD has two pictures of who commits felony assault: who complainants describe, and who gets arrested. They do not match. On 2025 complaints, 45.3 percent of described suspects were 25 to 44 and 24.3 percent had no age recorded at all. Among people actually arrested for felony assault in 2024, the last year the arrest file records age on every row, 59.6 percent were 25 to 44 and 2.3 percent were 65 or older. Roughly 71 percent of described suspects and 72 percent of arrestees were men.

Race is the chart people will screenshot, so here is every caveat that belongs beside it. Suspect race on a complaint is whatever the victim or a witness told an officer, and on 14.8 percent of 2025 felony assault complaints nobody recorded one; that bar is drawn as its own bar and stays out of the others. Among suspects who were described, 43.7 percent were Black, 28.8 percent Hispanic, 7.1 percent White and 5.4 percent Asian. Among the 22,964 people arrested for felony assault in 2025, 50.1 percent were Black, 34.3 percent Hispanic, 8.3 percent White and 6.8 percent Asian. The city is 20 percent Black, 28.7 percent Hispanic, 30.7 percent White and 15.2 percent Asian.

Two numbers say what that chart mostly counts. The first: of the 23,550 complaints in 2025 that recorded a race for both the suspect and the victim, 67.3 percent recorded the same race for both. The second: at the July 2, 2026 crime briefing, Commissioner Tisch said domestic violence accounts for 42 percent of felony assaults citywide.

And the third, which is where the assaults happen. Half of 2025’s felony assault complaints, 50.4 percent, list a residence as the location. A quarter list the street. The subway, the setting of nearly every case that made the ledger, accounts for 2 percent. Homeless shelters account for 2.9 percent citywide, and Vital City traced most of the city’s first-half 2026 rise in felony assault to one precinct, the Upper West Side’s 20th, where shelters recorded 14 complaints after none in the first half of 2025.

So the suspect chart measures a crime that mostly happens indoors, that is domestic 42 percent of the time, and whose two parties share a race two times out of three. Here is what it says, straight. Black New Yorkers are 20 percent of the city, 43.7 percent of the suspects complainants described and 50.1 percent of the people arrested for felony assault. In the same file, 64.6 percent of the victims of Black suspects were Black, 18.8 percent Hispanic, 10.5 percent White and 5.8 percent Asian; when the victim was White, the suspect was Black 37.4 percent of the time and White 36.9 percent. Whether stranger attacks look like that, no dataset says: the NYPD file does not record whether the two people knew each other, and coverage stated the attacker’s race for 5 of the 276 people identified in our ledger. We do not know, and neither does anyone who tells you they do.

The records

This is the section the argument turns on, so first, what the ledger can and cannot say. Of the 276 identified attackers, coverage reported a prior-arrest count for 128 and said nothing usable about the record of the other 148. Everything below is about the 128, and the reader should assume the 148 are not a random sample of the rest: a reporter who finds a long rap sheet prints it, and one who finds nothing often prints nothing.

Among the 128, the median was 8 prior arrests. Sixteen had none. Forty had between one and five, 35 had between six and 15, and 37 had 16 or more. Eighty-seven percent had been arrested at least once before the attack that put them in this ledger. Coverage described at least one violent prior for 128 of the identified attackers and said the record was nonviolent for 23.

The longest records are where the city’s shorthand comes from. Rashid Brimmage had 101 arrests, or 103, when he shoved a 92-year-old woman into a hydrant in June 2020. Clive Porter had 86 when he punched a 72-year-old man in the face on Hester Street in October 2025, the first of five incidents police tied to him in Chinatown and the Lower East Side that day. John Chappell had 67 when he pushed a 65-year-old woman down the stairs at Herald Square in May 2021; the ledger already had him from December 2020, when he punched a 68-year-old woman reading on a platform of the same station and broke her nose. Shaleek Brunson had 53, plus about two dozen sealed, when he chased a woman with a hammer onto the grounds of a Queens Jewish school in July 2026, two days after his second no-bail release in 18 days. Frank Abrokwa had 44 when he hit a woman in the face with a bag of feces at the Wakefield-241st Street station in February 2022, and had been released without bail on two subway-punch arrests that same winter. Alexander Wright had 40 when he punched a 55-year-old woman unconscious in Chinatown in May 2021, four days after a judge sentenced him to time served on two earlier violence cases.

Twenty-one names appear in the ledger more than once. Marquis Ventura is in it five times for 2020, including the punch that put Rick Moranis on the front pages in October; Daquan Armstead six times for the women he punched in Lower Manhattan between February and April 2024; Khari Covington four times for 2020; Jermain Rigueur four times for 2024. Joevani Vale stabbed a stranger in the back on President Street in September 2020, had the felony dismissed after 13 months in Mental Health Court, and in April 2023 punched one stranger and slashed another on the same morning he was charged with killing a neighbor in a Wyckoff Gardens elevator. Waldo Mejia stabbed a man on the stairs at Third Avenue and 138th Street on January 5, 2025, and five days later stabbed Caleb Rijos to death on the same street.

Then the question every case ends up at: what was the attacker’s status when it happened? Coverage answered it for 84 of the 276. Twenty-eight had been released without bail on an open case, 15 were on parole, 12 had an open warrant, 12 were on supervised release, four were out on bail, two were on probation, and one, Kerri Aherne, had been discharged from Manhattan Psychiatric Center the morning she bought a knife in Macy’s. Ten had no open case and no supervision. So of the 84 attackers whose status was reported, 73 were on a criminal-justice release, under supervision or carrying an open case at the moment they attacked a stranger, and one had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital that morning; for ten cases coverage pinned down the interval: all ten within 30 days of a release, nine within a week, two on the same day.

The 20 people identified in fatal cases whose record was reported are a smaller and different group. Six had no prior arrest on record: James Woods, who punched Angel Diaz in 2020; Peter Zisopoulos, who stabbed EMS Lieutenant Alison Russo-Elling in Astoria in 2022; Brian Dowling, who stabbed Ryan Carson in 2023; Jorell Shoals and Sebastian Zapeta-Calil in 2024; Pamela Cisneros, with no New York arrests, in 2026. The median among the 20 was 4 prior arrests, half the median for the ledger as a whole, and only three had 16 or more. The people identified in fatal stranger attacks in New York are, on this evidence, less likely to have a long record than the people identified in the punches.

The state publishes one series on what happens after release, and it answers a different question from the ledger’s: of everyone released at arraignment, how many were arrested again?

The Division of Criminal Justice Services tracks every case arraigned in New York City Criminal Courts and reports whether the person was re-arrested within 180 days, or before the case was disposed if that came first. For cases arraigned in 2024, 17.9 percent of people released on their own recognizance were re-arrested in that window, 3 percent for a violent felony. Of people released under supervision or on other non-monetary conditions, 43.5 percent were re-arrested, 8.1 percent for a violent felony. Of people who paid bail, 22.1 percent, and 5.3 percent for a violent felony. In 2019, before the bail law changed, the same three rates were 17.7, 38.8 and 24.1 percent.

The recognizance and bail rates barely moved, the supervised rate rose about five points, and the groups changed size. Table 12 counts cases, so a person arraigned twice counts twice. In 2019 the courts released people under supervision or conditions in 4,972 cases and on paid bail in 6,820. In 2024 it was 29,854 cases under supervision or conditions and 2,647 on paid bail. The 2019 law moved tens of thousands of cases a year into the one release category with a re-arrest rate above 40 percent: 4,972 cases in 2019, 29,854 in 2024. Both sides of the bail fight can read that table and find their sentence in it. Ninety-two percent of the supervised group were not re-arrested for a violent felony within six months, and the group was 29,854 cases in 2024.

The NYPD’s own repeat-offender figures are two numbers with less behind them. At the January 6, 2025 briefing Commissioner Tisch compared 2024 with 2018 and reported a 146.5 percent increase in people arrested three or more times in the same year for felony assault, against 61.3 percent for burglary and 83.3 percent for robbery. The New York Post attached raw counts to the felony assault figure the next day, 442 in 2024 up from 274 in 2018; those counts work out to a 61.3 percent rise, which is the burglary number, so our report uses the commissioner’s percentages and leaves the counts alone. On September 3, 2026 the Post reported new NYPD figures on a different measure: 263 people arrested for felony assault this year through August who had previously been arrested three or more times for felony assault, against 86 in the same months of 2018.

Then there is the number the NYPD computed once and never officially published. In October 2022 an internal analysis reported by amNewYork found that out of 38,608 year-to-date arrests for the seven major crimes, 9,049, about 23.4 percent, involved someone with an emotionally-disturbed-person history; for felony assault the share was 21.7 percent, 3,495 of 16,100 arrests, and for felony assault in the subway it was 42.5 percent, 74 of 174. The department has not repeated the analysis in public. And the city’s involuntary transports, the mechanism every reform since 2022 has leaned on, rose from 7,060 officer-initiated in 2024 to 7,299 in 2025 while clinician-initiated transports nearly doubled from 758 to 1,408 (the city’s updated counts) and the share of those taken to public hospitals admitted for inpatient care fell from 58 to 48 percent. More people picked up, a smaller share kept.

The case everyone remembers, and the median case

Each year of this ledger has one case that carried the argument: the video that ran on every station, the name that appeared in the governor’s or the mayor’s next sentence about bail or Kendra’s Law. The table puts each year’s most covered case beside the median prior-arrest count of that year’s identified attackers.

In 2020 the case was Brimmage, and nothing else in the ledger looks like it: 101 arrests against a median of 12, at liberty on desk appearance tickets for three open assault cases and nine skipped court dates. In 2021 it was Vilma Kari, kicked and stomped outside a Hell’s Kitchen apartment building by Brandon Elliot, whose record was two arrests, one for robbery in 2000 and one for stabbing his mother to death in 2002, and whose status was lifetime parole; the median identified attacker that year had 12 arrests. In 2022 it was Michelle Go, shoved in front of an R train at Times Square; the man charged, Martial Simon, had two prior felony convictions and an open parole-violation warrant, and was found unfit to stand trial; the median that year was 10. In 2023 it was Ryan Carson, killed at a Bed-Stuy bus stop by Brian Dowling, 18, who had never been arrested, in a year whose median was 3. In 2024 it was the Ramon Rivera spree, three people killed in about two and a half hours, by a man with eight New York arrests, mainly for shoplifting and none with a weapon, plus a 2024 plea for assaulting a correction officer at Bellevue, who had been released from Rikers a month earlier and was out without bail on his most recent arrests; the median that year was 4. In 2025 it was the Macy’s stabbing by Kerri Aherne, whose one prior arrest was for online threats in Massachusetts in 2018 and who had left a state psychiatric hospital that morning, against a median of 15. In 2026 it was Erin Piacenti, killed by Pamela Cisneros, who had no New York arrests, against a median of 5.5.

Five of the seven attackers had thinner records than the median attacker of their year. Two of them were on parole, the supervision the bail argument keeps asking for, and it did not stop them. Three had almost nothing, and the discharge from Manhattan Psychiatric Center on the morning of December 11, 2025 is the one release decision in the table that the bail law had nothing to do with. The cases that made New York’s argument about repeat offenders were, in two of the seven years, 2025’s and 2026’s, cases about mental illness that no bail decision ever reached; in two, 2021’s and 2022’s, cases about parole that did not hold; in one, Ryan Carson’s, a case about a record no system had ever seen; and in two, Brimmage’s year and the Rivera spree’s, the kind of case the argument is about.

The subway line

Here the two layers are furthest apart. The subway is 2 percent of felony assault complaints and 45 percent of this ledger: 203 of the 454 cases, including 80 shoves. Part of that is where strangers meet, and part of it is that a shove on a platform gets a camera and a press release in a way a punch in a hallway does not.

For the subway the official count is easy to read, because the Transit Bureau publishes one table that runs back to 1997.

Felony assaults in the subway fell from 501 in 1997 to 155 in 2009 and then climbed for sixteen years to 593 in 2025, the highest figure in the series. From 2019 to 2025 the count rose 59 percent, from 373 to 593, while subway robberies fell from 546 to 398. Murders underground ran 3, 6, 8, 10, 5, 10 and 4 across those seven years. Ridership fell and came back across the same period, so the per-ride rate moved more than the count; Vital City’s midyear 2026 analysis counts 1,071 major felonies across nearly 650 million rides in the first half of the year, fewer than two per million rides, and still about 20 percent higher per million rides than in 2019.

The subway is also where the population of attackers is best documented. Vital City’s analysis of people arrested for violent subway crime in 2022 and 2023, by Aaron Chalfin, John Hall and Paul Reeping, found that 70.7 percent had a prior arrest for violent crime somewhere in the city in the previous six years and 16.8 percent had a prior arrest for violent subway crime. Among frequent violent offenders, 59 percent had documented mental health issues, 41 percent were documented as homeless and 65 percent had either. The December 2025 update, counting a different group, put the share of people with subway violence arrests who had a documented history of homelessness, mental illness or both at 89 percent, and found that 30 of the system’s 472 stations account for half of its violent crime.

Track shoves are the attack the city argues about most and counts least. The NYPD has published three figures: 26 in 2024, 19 in 2025, and nine in the first ten weeks of 2026, all quoted by CBS New York on March 10, 2026. The department has not published a full-year series, so the chart draws the three years it has said something about and leaves the others blank. For scale, the complaint file records 584 felony assaults in the subway in 2025 against the Transit Bureau’s 593, the same two-file gap the murder count has, and the subway is 2 percent of felony assault complaints citywide.

The ledgers, 2020 to 2026

Open Data & Press Kit: The entire 557-incident database is available for download in CSV format (214 KB) and JSON format (1.19 MB) for reporters, researchers, and community advocates. See the bottom of this report for citation and embed tools.

One row per attack, in date order, with the first source linked; a case with several victims is one row. Attacks the police called disputes, cases whose “random” label came only from a witness or a single outlet’s framing, and killings between people who knew each other are in the data file with the reason they were set aside, and they are in none of the tables or charts. “Not reported” means the linked coverage did not say. The 2026 rows were transcribed from the 2026 tracker into this format; that page groups them differently and profiles the 14 attackers whose records it could report.