He Slashed Five Strangers at Penn Station. He Was Free After an Almost Identical 2022 Attack.

At about 7:15 p.m. on Sunday, June 7, 2026, a man pulled a knife inside New York’s Penn Station and started slashing strangers at random near 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue — the busiest transit hub in the Western Hemisphere, jammed with commuters and fans heading to a Knicks playoff game at Madison Square Garden one level up. By the time Amtrak police tackled and arrested him, six people had been hurt, ages 16 to 65, the oldest in serious condition. All are expected to survive.

Police identified the suspect as Hector De Leon, 51, of Newark, New Jersey — a homeless man with a documented history of mental illness, an active bench warrant out of Manhattan, and six prior arrests, the most recent in May 2026. According to records reported by the New York Post, De Leon was free that night despite an eerily similar attack four years earlier: in 2022 he allegedly slashed a man in the neck in New Jersey, was released on cashless bail, and walked away with two years of probation.

De Leon is presumed innocent and, as of this writing, remained hospitalized under sedation and had not been formally charged. But the through-line of the records is the story: a man who allegedly cut a stranger’s neck with a knife in 2022 was on the street, warrant outstanding, when — according to police — he did almost exactly the same thing to five more people in 2026. That is not bad luck. That is a justice system that was warned.

• 6 wounded — victims slashed in the June 7, 2026 Penn Station rampage, ages 16 to 65, one in serious condition · Source: amNewYork, Gothamist, CBS New York
• 2022 — the earlier almost-identical attack: De Leon allegedly slashed a man's neck in New Jersey, was released on cashless bail, and got two years' probation · Source: New York Post, BNO News
• 6 arrests — De Leon's prior record before the Penn Station spree — plus an active Manhattan bench warrant — yet he was free · Source: amNewYork, ABC7 New York

The attack unfolded during the Sunday-evening crush. Police received calls just after 7 p.m. reporting multiple people stabbed at an entrance to Penn Station near West 33rd Street, with Madison Square Garden directly above and the New York Knicks set to host playoff games at the arena that week. According to police and multiple outlets, the suspect moved through the concourse slashing strangers seemingly at random before Amtrak police officers stunned him, tackled him, and recovered a knife on the NJ Transit side of the station.

Six people were hurt, ranging in age from 16 to 65; all were taken to Bellevue Hospital and are expected to survive. Among the victims who later spoke publicly was Henry Obadiah, 60, slashed on the cheek and lip, who described the moment to ABC7: “The crazy guy locked eyes with me and then he just came at me with a roundhouse and got me.” Another victim, Steven Hadgkiss, 52, needed six stitches to a wound on his neck. None of the injuries were life-threatening, police said — an outcome that owed more to luck and fast medics than to anything the system did to prevent the attack.

Keep Reading

Society · Trump Derangement Syndrome

A President Went to a Basketball Game. The Internet Lost Its Mind.

Read →

The detail that turns a tragic random attack into an accountability story is the record. According to the New York Post, De Leon had carried out an eerily similar attack roughly four years earlier — allegedly slashing a man in the neck in New Jersey in 2022. The disposition of that case is the part that should stop readers cold: he was released on cashless bail and ultimately sentenced to two years of probation. No prison. No incapacitation. A man who allegedly put a knife to a stranger’s throat was, within a short stretch of time, back on the street.

That 2022 case sat atop a longer record. De Leon had six prior arrests, most of them in New Jersey, the most recent on May 22, 2026 in Long Branch on theft and drug-paraphernalia charges — barely two weeks before the Penn Station rampage. He also had an active bench warrant out of Manhattan, meaning the New York court system already had a documented, unanswered reason to bring him in. He was, in the plainest terms, a known quantity to two states’ justice systems, and he was free anyway.

“The crazy guy locked eyes with me and then he just came at me with a roundhouse and got me.”

Henry Obadiah, 60, Penn Station slashing victim, to ABC7 New York · paraphrased from his on-camera account

New York’s bail-reform framework, enacted in 2019 and amended several times since, sharply limited the cases in which judges may set cash bail or order pretrial detention. Supporters point to research showing the reforms reduced overall re-arrest rates. But the same body of research carries a finding its champions tend to skip: a Data Collaborative for Justice study at John Jay College found that releasing defendants who had a recent prior violent-felony arrest actually raisedtheir recidivism — precisely the category a man with an alleged 2022 neck-slashing belongs in. The reform was not built to keep watch on the De Leons of the system.

And the De Leon case is not an outlier. NYPD leaders have publicly fumed about repeat offenders cycling through arrest and release — in one widely reported 2024 case, a man arrested six times in a single year was released without bail again. The department’s own bulletin on “career and violent criminals” exploiting the system documents the pattern. A bench warrant that goes unserved, a probation sentence for a knife attack, an out-of-state record that never triggers a hold — each gap is small. Stacked together, they put a knife back in a crowded train station.

Keep Reading

DOGE Watch · Deregulation

The Supreme Court Just Reopened the Fight Over Biden's Gas-Furnace Rule — the One That Would Outlaw Half the Furnaces in America.

Read →

When a man with an active Manhattan bench warrant and an alleged history of knife violence is free to slash five people in the city’s central transit hub, the responsible offices are not abstractions. Any New York charges flowing from the Penn Station attack land on the desk of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), whose office has drawn sustained criticism over how it handles repeat violent offenders. The city’s overall public-safety posture sits with Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), who called the attack “unacceptable violence” in a statement the night it happened. And the bail and sentencing rules that shaped the 2022 outcome trace to Albany, where Gov. Kathy Hochul (D)and the Legislature have repeatedly debated — and repeatedly declined to fully close — the repeat-violent-offender gap.

The 2022 disposition itself — cashless bail, then probation for an alleged neck slashing — came out of the New Jersey courts, a reminder that “soft on repeat violence” is not a single jurisdiction’s problem. But the place this man landed, and the place the warrant went unserved, was New York. Mamdani’s sympathy statement is the standard mayoral script after an attack; what it does not address is why a man his own city’s courts had already flagged was walking through Penn Station with a knife in the first place.

A necessary line: Hector De Leon is presumed innocent of the Penn Station attack until a court says otherwise. He had not been formally charged as of this writing, remained hospitalized under sedation, and police described him as emotionally disturbed and apparently under the influence of a controlled substance during the rampage. The account here rests on what police and victims have stated and on what the public records show — not on a verdict. The 2022 New Jersey case is likewise described as alleged conduct that ended in a probation sentence.

But the accountability question does not wait on a jury, because it is not about whether this one man is guilty — it is about why a person with this exact documented profile was free to be on that platform at all. The records, not a presumption, are what indict the system: an alleged knife attack in 2022, cashless release, probation, six arrests, an unserved Manhattan warrant, and a fresh New Jersey arrest two weeks before Penn Station. Every one of those is a moment the system saw him and let him go.

The lesson is narrow and well-evidenced, which is what makes it damning. No serious person argues for jailing every defendant before trial, and the bail-reform research is right that release helps far more first-time and nonviolent defendants than it harms. The failure is specific: the system does not reliably detain or supervise the small group of defendants with recent violent-felony histories — the exact group the John Jay research flags as a higher recidivism risk, and the exact group an alleged 2022 neck-slasher belongs to.

Closing that gap is a policy choice that Albany, the Manhattan DA, and New Jersey’s courts each had the power to make and did not. A bench warrant served. A hold for a repeat violent defendant. A sentence that incapacitated rather than supervised. Any one of them might have kept this man off the Penn Station concourse on June 7. Six wounded strangers, ages 16 to 65, are the cost of treating “he’ll probably do it again” as a statistic instead of a warning.

More From Civic Intelligence

Drain the Swamp · Public-Safety Spending

A Baltimore 'Violence Interrupter' Is Charged With Attempted Murder. The Mayor Says the Program Is Working.

A taxpayer-funded Safe Streets violence interrupter — head of a nonprofit that took $1.2M+ in grants…

Drain the Swamp · Homelessness Spending

Seattle Couldn't Clear Its Streets for Residents. For the World Cup Cameras, It Found a Way.

Seattle promised 500 new shelter units before the 2026 World Cup at Lumen Field and delivered 75 —…

Last updated June 9, 2026