NEW YORK — A graduate student at Columbia University died and another man was wounded after the two were injured in stabbings in Upper Manhattan on Thursday night, police and college officials said.
The student, Davide Giri, was walking a few blocks from the school’s Morningside Heights campus just before 11 p.m. when he was stabbed in the abdomen. He was pronounced dead after being taken to a hospital.
The police arrested a 25-old-man for the attack and said Friday morning that charges were pending. His name had been not released Friday morning, but police said he was found in Central Park and that he had been menacing a third man with a knife.
In a campuswide letter sent Friday morning, Lee Bollinger, the university’s president, identified Giri, 30, as a student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and expressed sadness over his death.
“This news is both unspeakably sad and deeply shocking, as it took place only steps from our campus,” Bollinger wrote. “On behalf of the entire Columbia community, I send my deepest condolences to Davide’s family.”
Giri, a doctoral candidate in computer science who was expected to graduate in May, had begun working as a research assistant at Columbia around 2016, after studying at schools in Italy and Chicago, according to his personal website. He played soccer competitively for more than two decades and was also trained in classical piano.
In a statement on Twitter, Gale Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, noted the physical proximity between the street where Giri was attacked and the section of Morningside Park a few blocks away where an 18-year-old student at Barnard College was fatally stabbed two years ago.
The student, Tessa Majors, died after three teenagers attacked her in an armed robbery. Her killing shocked students at the two abutting campuses and residents in the neighborhood.
Brewer said that she felt “profound sadness” at the death of Giri, “whose life was taken from us too soon.”
“Davide as I understand came to us from Italy,” she wrote. “His students nominated him successfully for a teaching award. His fellow students, dept. & university, and family must be devastated at his tragic death. I share in that grief & devastation.”
The other man who was stabbed Thursday night was a tourist from Italy, police said, and is expected to survive. The man, who is 27 and was spending his first day in New York, was stabbed in his torso blocks away from the initial attack near the northwest entrance to Central Park.
The separate attacks, which police said they believed were both unprovoked, rattled those in the neighborhood Friday morning.
Haswanth Venkatavijayan, a student at Columbia who lives across the street from where Giri was stabbed, said he had walked by the site of the attack about a half-hour before it took place.
“I don’t know what would have happened if I had been here later,” Venkatavijayan, 22, said, adding that he had hoped incidents like the stabbing would not occur so close to campus.
Nicole Alexander, a Morningside Heights resident, said she walks by the intersection where Giri was stabbed while traveling to work. She had not been aware of his death, but she said that she had long been concerned about the area.
“It’s always a lot going on over here,” said Alexander, 51. “When I get home, I stay indoors, because I know how it is.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .