Crime

blahAt the close of 2007, the New York City Police Department reported significantly declining crime rates, and announced that the city had experienced 496 homicides in the past year, as opposed to 2,245 homicides in 1990.

A week after arriving in New York, the parents of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Minghui Yu are struggling to cope with the sudden death of their 24-year-old son and to arrange a memorial service in his honor.

According to a police report, Aurelio Molina, 45, was stabbed in the torso Tuesday afternoon. Police responded at around 2:50 p.m. and transported Molina to Harlem Hospital, where he later died. The suspect, 48-year-old Wayne Bradley, was arrested at the scene and charged with murder.

When three men struck Maurice Parks to the ground and attempted to rob him as he walked home on Jan. 10, he pulled out a knife to fight his assailants, leading to the hospitalization of all four men—and the death of possible “Good Samaritan” Flonarza Byas.

Even the most personal experiences can be abstracted into a number. As Stalin once said, “The death of one is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.”

At least two Morningside Heights stores were robbed late last week, although more may have been victims as well.

Police responding to reports of a male shot found a body that had been gunned down in front of 133 W. 104th St. shortly after midnight Thursday.

One man was killed and another injured in a shooting outside Amsterdam Avenue restaurant Radio Perfecto early Sunday morning. The perpetrators are still at large.

As hundreds of students, professors, and city leaders gathered Wednesday to protest the hanging of a noose on the office door of an African American Teachers College professor, police said that there were no suspects yet in the criminal investigation of the incident.

A flower delivery van ran over an elderly woman on Amsterdam Avenue Thursday morning, trapping her between the pavement and the car’s roaring undercarriage for several minutes until rescue units were able to lift the vehicle.