Police in Davis are likely to make an arrest Thursday afternoon in a series of three stabbings that happened in the last week and killed two men and seriously hurt a woman.
A law enforcement source who knew about the arrest but wasn’t allowed to talk about it told The Sacramento Bee that the statement is about a “person of interest” who was arrested Wednesday night near Sycamore Park, where a fatal stabbing happened last Saturday.
Davis police didn’t reply to a request for comment Thursday morning, but they did post on their Facebook page that there would be a press conference at 2 p.m. and that they had “detained a person in connection with two homicides and an attempted homicide that have happened over the past week.”
Gary S. May, the chancellor of UC Davis, told a reporter from the Sacramento Bee on Thursday morning that a statement of some kind was planned for later in the day.
The person of interest’s name has not been made public, but a source said he lived in Davis. Police warned on Wednesday that no one had been arrested, but that other “persons of interest” had been held during the week-long probe.
The source told The Bee that the expected arrest news will be about one person who is thought to be behind all three attacks.
The person who has arrested around 5 p.m. on Wednesday a block from Sycamore Park fit the description of the suspect in two of the attacks. They were also wearing black Adidas pants with a white stripe, just like the pants that witnesses had seen the suspect wearing.
The news comes after a string of stabbings that started on April 27 in Davis when 50-year-old David Henry Breaux was killed and his body was found in the city’s Central Park.
On April 29, Karim Abou Najm, a senior at UC Davis, was stabbed to death at Sycamore Park. He was 20 years old. On Thursday at 4 p.m., there will be a funeral service for him.
On May 1, just before midnight, a homeless woman was struck by someone who stabbed her multiple times through the side of a tent in a camp at Second and L streets.
Witnesses saw the attacker at the camp and running away toward downtown, but a huge search of the area and an order for people to stay in place didn’t turn up any leads.
The attack didn’t kill the woman.
Even though the police said at first that they couldn’t say that all three stabbings were done by the same person, the attacks created a lot of fear in the city and on the UC Davis campus. Night classes were moved to online learning, and people were told not to walk around alone at night.
Some people started their own patrols to look for a suspect, and police checks in the city and on campus were stepped up as a show of force.
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