Edgar Sandoval, William K. Rashbaum and Yonette Joseph

Clad in all black, he then ran a block north and attacked two more men sleeping on a sidewalk, killing one. The second man barely staggered away with his life.

By the time a suspect was arrested, four homeless men had been killed and a fifth had been severely injured in a rampage that represented one of the most harrowing events in recent memory for New York City’s homeless population, which has been steadily rising even as the city has maintained solid economic growth.

Advocates say it is difficult to determine the exact number of homeless people living on the city’s streets, in the subways and in other public spaces, but it is thought to be in the thousands.

The attacks spread new anxiety among homeless people in the neighborhood, many of whom are already grappling with mental illness, drug addiction and other maladies. The area centers on the Bowery, which has a long history of sheltering — both on the streets and in flophouses — people who are down on their luck. The five men were set upon just south of the Bowery Mission, one of the city’s oldest aid organizations.

Early Saturday, just steps away from the scenes of the killings, police officers spotted a 24-year-old man, also believed to be homeless, who fit the descriptions of the killer given by the survivor and other witnesses.

He was holding a metal bar dripping with blood and was taken into custody without incident, police said.

“The motive appears to be, right now, just random attacks,” said Michael Baldassano, chief of Manhattan South Detectives. “No one was targeted by race, age, anything of that nature.”

The suspect was identified as Rudy Rodriguez Santos, and he was expected to be charged Saturday afternoon with murder, according to a law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation.

Santos was captured on surveillance video approaching the locations where the attacks had occurred carrying a metal bar, the official said. At least one of the attacks was also recorded by a security camera.

When investigators showed him the video, Santos identified himself in the images but did not explicitly admit he had killed the men, the official said. Investigators repeatedly asked him why he had attacked the victims, but he refused to answer and then asked for a lawyer, the official said.

The attacks took place near Chatham Square, where the statue of the Chinese scholar Lin Zexu stands on a red granite pedestal overlooking East Broadway, a street that runs along the newer part of Chinatown, and the Bowery, the edge of the old Chinatown.

But the area has been changing rapidly in recent years, as Chinatown has expanded and young professionals, many pushed out by higher rents in the East Village, have begun to move in.

The neighborhood is a bustling traffic hub where commuter vans and long-distance buses vie for curb space. Signs for Chinese family and village associations dot the area. But at night it becomes a place where a growing number of homeless people look for a place to grab a night’s sleep on its quiet sidewalks and park benches.

Advocates for the homeless said Saturday morning’s attacks rattled the already struggling community of homeless people who frequent Chinatown and the Bowery.

“It’s absolutely horrifying,” Giselle Routhier, policy director for the Coalition for the Homeless, said. “We’re not sure what the motive was in this case, but it’s certainly very disturbing.”

Johnnie Wilcox, 62, who lives on the streets, said that violence is a nearly daily occurrence for homeless people like him.

“I’ve had guys that walk, drinking, coming out of bars, running and jumping onto my stomach,” Wilcox said. “Living on the streets is hell.”

The fifth victim, who is 49 years old, was transported to the hospital with critical injuries, police said. Police said victims of the killings included an 83-year-old man and a 54-year-old man.

Hours after the quadruple homicide, passersby stared and winced at the evidence left behind at the scenes of the attacks. Behind a police tape on the south side of East Broadway, blood coated the storefront of Forever Health Pharmacy.

The scene on the corner of Doyers and Bowery looked grislier. Behind a row of police officers, an empty forefront was splattered with blood going in multiple directions.

“It’s pretty shocking to see it in Chinatown,” said Kevin Pan, 36, a visitor from Washington, D.C.

“In broad daylight,” added Amy Dee, 34. “To be honest, I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Neighborhood residents said they had seen a growing number of people sleeping around the small park in Chatham Square, in the vestibule of a local HSBC bank or on the street because they deemed a homeless shelter on Catherine Street unsafe.

“Things get stolen,” said Huibing He, 64, a retired pastor at a nearby United Methodist Church, who said she has heard some of those concerns firsthand from the homeless. “They are beaten, bullied,” she added. “When they come to our church, I see they are very broken.”

Around noon, much of the area remained blocked off, with East Broadway closed off to cars from its inception at Chatham Square to the Manhattan Bridge.

Earlier that morning scores of police converged on the intersections of Bowery and Doyers Street. At least two of the officers from the 5th Precinct took cellphone photos of a blood-splattered door.

“It’s very sad,” one officer said to the other.

A few steps away, two men who described themselves as homeless and regulars of the neighborhood, said the killings unnerved them because they knew one of the victims. The three men often shared a sleeping spot outside an area bakery. Their friend, they said, slept by a doorway with his cane by his side.

“That’s his bed. Nobody else sleeps there,” said one of the men.

Andy Wang, 45, a manager at the Taiwan Pork Chop House, said one of the victims liked to sit in the same table for two by the kitchen and order the same meal, pork chop over rice for $5.75.

The victim, who spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese, would simply sit there and savor his meal. “He would come in, and we would get the same order, and he wouldn’t say anything,” Wang said in Mandarin. “He wouldn’t need to say anything.”

Andrew Harris, 28, who said he had been homeless for about four years, was stunned that this would happen in an area he described as “usually safe.”

“I’m angry,” Harris added, looking at the blood splatters and patches of matted hair inside the doorway. “Someone tried to send homeless people a message — people from our community — and that makes me angry.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office said in a statement that it will dedicate resources to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

In New York City, with a population of 8.5 million, about 1 in 121 New Yorkers is homeless, according to the Bowery Mission, the advocacy group. The Coalition for the Homeless put the number of homeless people in the city’s shelter system in August at 61,674, and an annual count conducted in late January this year estimated that 3,588 people were living on the streets.

De Blasio, a Democrat who ran on a promise of reversing the effects of income inequality, has struggled to address the problem of the rising number of homeless people and the high rate of mental illness among them. In 2017, he called for a “blood-and-guts war strategy” to tackle the problem, including opening 90 new shelters.

This article originally appeared in

In Chinatown, Rampage Against Sleeping Homeless Men Leaves 4 Dead

NEW YORK — The killer first struck just before 2 a.m. Saturday on a quiet spot on East Broadway in Chinatown, sneaking up on three homeless men as they slept on a sidewalk and bludgeoning them to death with a rusty, 3-foot metal bar, police said.

By the time a suspect was arrested, four homeless men had been killed and a fifth had been severely injured in a rampage that represented one of the most harrowing events in recent memory for New York City’s homeless population, which has been steadily rising.

The attacks spread new anxiety among homeless people in the neighborhood. The area centers on the Bowery, which has a long history of sheltering people who are down on their luck. The five men were set upon just south of the Bowery Mission, one of the city’s oldest aid organizations.

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Edgar Sandoval, William K. Rashbaum and Yonette Joseph

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In Chinatown, Rampage Against Sleeping Homeless Men Leaves 4 Dead

In Chinatown, Rampage Against Sleeping Homeless Men Leaves 4 Dead