The man accused of killing three people in a grimly stabbing spree on Monday had been released from New York City jail a month earlier and was free on bail for other alleged crimes in New Jersey, records showed.
Just hours after 51-year-old Ramon Rivera was taken into custody following the trio of slayings, New York City Mayor Eric Adams was already questioning why the homeless man was walking free.
“He was sentenced a few months ago, and there’s a real question that we need to look at on why he was out on the streets, and he has some severe mental health issues that should have been examined,” Adams told reporters on Monday.
Rivera has now been charged with three counts of first-degree murder, police said.
He was released from a New York City jail on Oct. 17 for time served on burglary and assault charges, records showed. The day he was released, Rivera allegedly committed grand larceny by taking property from a Manhattan store, records showed.
And earlier this year, Rivera was charged with multiple crimes in neighboring New Jersey, according to the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office.
He was accused of breaking into a CBD store, the Green Room, on Jan. 11 and stealing “mason jars of CBD bus and other items,” according to a grand jury indictment.
Then four days later, Rivera allegedly grabbed “phones and other electronics” from Hi Wireless store in Union City, another indictment said.
In total, Rivera has been arrested eight times in New York City in the past year, court records showed. He’d also been arrested in Ohio and Florida.
“The Criminal Justice Reform Act provides an outline for when a defendant should be detained or released from custody pending prosecution,” a spokesperson for the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement. “Given the nature of these offenses, the defendant was released on pretrial observation.
Rivera was arrested after three people were killed in attacks that police called “unprovoked.”
Angel Lata Landi, a 36-year-old construction worker from Peekskill, was attacked near his worksite at 444 W. 19th St. at 8:22 a.m. ET, police said.
Then at 10:27 a.m., a man, 67, was stabbed to death as he was fishing in the East River near 500 E. 30th St., about 2.3 miles and a 52-minute walk from where Landi was attacked. The fisherman was not immediately identified, pending notification of his family.
The third victim was fatally stabbed near East 42nd Street and First Avenue at 10:55 a.m., about three-quarters of a mile and a 15-minute walk from the second slaying. That victim was identified as Wilma Augustin, a 36-year-old woman who lived in Manhattan.
Augustin had an 8-year-old child, according to Mayor Adams, who hinted that the slain mother might have become a new US resident.
“One person is just fishing on FDR Drive and he’s stabbed. Another person is on his way to work and a mother of an 8-year-old child” are both killed, Adams told reporters on Tuesday.
“You know that child came here, that family came here to pursue the American dream. How do you explain to that child what happened?”
Augustin’s publicly listed address appeared to be a shelter for newly arrived migrants, although Adams still just briefly identified the victim as a migrant.
“We have to look into that, we’re still clearing out exactly what’s going on and exactly what happened,” he told reporters.
Rivera was arrested a short time later, after the Augustin attack, police said.
Gemma DiCasimirro, Erin McLaughlin and Marc Santia contributed.