{"id":956807,"date":"2026-07-24T19:17:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T19:17:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/956807\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T19:17:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T19:17:20","slug":"suspected-uws-stabbers-calm-claim-to-his-roommate-before-rampage-revealed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/956807\/","title":{"rendered":"Suspected UWS stabber’s calm claim to his roommate before rampage revealed"},"content":{"rendered":"

The stunned roommate of the nut\u00a0who allegedly attacked<\/a>\u00a0two Upper West Side victims said Friday that the man calmly told him he was just going for a walk in the park before the violence \u2014 as cops searched their home for evidence of a possible hate crime and carted off items including\u00a0a Koran\u00a0and book on Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.<\/p>\n

The roomie recounted his seemingly blase encounter with now-suspected ex-con Raul Morales, 51, to NYPD investigators in Spanish at their apartment on Amsterdam Avenue near West 88th Street in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

The roommate said Morales \u2014 a former drug parolee and an apparent onetime Brooklyn security guard \u2014 did not appear angry or agitated, leaving him shocked at what cops said was to come.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Raul Morales is suspected in the stabbing. NY Post<\/p>\n

Investigators carted off items including\u00a0a Koran\u00a0and book on Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. Jordan Donegan \/ NYPost<\/p>\n

Neighbors at the building, which is near Central Park, also said they had no inkling Morales could allegedly pull off such violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever displayed anything,\u2019\u2019 said a resident who only identified himself as Tony J, 54.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why when I seen him yesterday coming out the building in handcuffs, I was like, \u2018What the f\u2013k is he locked up for?\u201d he said of Morales.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt blew my mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was always nice. he\u2019s like, never no problem,\u2019\u2019 said Tony, adding he\u2019d seen Morales at the building for years. \u201cHe was never a head case, and he didn\u2019t display no mental problems or nothing like that.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time I see him, he was always, \u2018Hey, how you doing?\u2019 Super, super cordial. \u2026 That\u2019s why if he had a mental break, I have not the slightest idea.<\/p>\n

Moshe Yezhak Grunhaus was stabbed in the attack. Facebook \/ Lidia Lander<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you never know what goes through people\u2019s minds. It\u2019s New York City for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another building resident, Carlos Ramos, 73, said he\u2019d seen Morales around on and off for a few years and only really knew he went outside more in the summer \u2014 but was equally shocked at the notion that his neighbor was Thursday\u2019s attacker.<\/p>\n

Morales is\u00a0believed to have yelled, \u201cAllahu Akbar!,\u2019<\/a>\u2019 or\u00a0\u201cGod is greater!\u2019\u2019 in Arabic during the separate\u00a0screwdriver and knife attacks<\/a>\u00a0on a Jewish New Yorker in a yarmulke and an Asian man.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think he knows what it means to be racist\u201d because \u201cthere are a lot of Jewish communities here,\u2019\u2019 Ramos said.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet me tell you. The Jewish people that live around here? They mind their own business,\u2019\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n

As for Morales, \u201che was a lonely person all the time. Lonely. I see him alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The neighbors spoke as cops\u00a0were executing a search warrant on Morales\u2019 apartment in the building, where he was dragged out of after Thursday\u2019s assault.<\/p>\n

He was custody but had yet to be charged as authorities pushed to gather more evidence from the warrant \u2014 as well as scour for video footage of the attacks \u2014 to try to bolster the charges they are sure to bring against him even with his possible mental illness, including involving the potential hate crime, law-enforcement sources said.<\/p>\n

Members of the New York City Police Department Crime Scene Unit collect evidence at the scene of a stabbing near West 84th Street and Central Park West in Manhattan, New York. James Keivom for NY Post<\/p>\n

Among the items they hauled off Friday was a Koran\u00a0and the famous 1997 biography, \u201cChe Guevara: A Revolutionary Life\u201d by The New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson.<\/p>\n

Morales \u2014 who apparently worked as a security guard in Brooklyn at least around 2007, previously did two years in state prison on drug charges in the early 1990s and remained on probation for much of the decade, sources said.<\/p>\n

He\u00a0had at least two drug-possession arrests\u00a0under his belt. He also has five prior sealed arrests, sources said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The stunned roommate of the nut\u00a0who allegedly attacked\u00a0two Upper West Side victims said Friday that the man calmly…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":956808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,5248,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,8626,67,586,132,5230,36246,68,1154,2969],"class_list":["post-956807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-metro","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-stabbings","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-upper-west-side","tag-us","tag-us-news","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116976566151005153","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/956808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}