When he was caught, the intruder was still covered in the blood of his victims — five Hasidic Jews he had stabbed wildly with a machete at a rabbi’s home while candles on the Hanukkah menorah still burned.
But the toll might have been worse had those assembled not fought back, hitting the intruder with pieces of furniture, forcing him to retreat.
He had concealed his face with a scarf when he burst into the home in this Hasidic community in the New York suburbs at about 10pm on Saturday, the police and witnesses said.
“At the beginning, he started wielding his machete back and forth, trying to hit everyone around,” said Josef Gluck, 32, who was at the home of the Hasidic rabbi, Chaim Rottenberg, for the celebration of the seventh night of Hanukkah.
Gluck said the assailant screamed at him, “Hey you, I’ll get you” during the attack.
In terror, people fled the living room. Gluck recalled dashing into the kitchen, scooping up a small child and then going down a back porch.
Gluck returned, saw an older victim bleeding heavily and then tried to confront the attacker. “I grabbed an old antique coffee table and I threw it at his face,” Gluck said.
A suspect, Grafton Thomas, 38, was later arrested in Harlem after police traced his licence plate using a photo Gluck had taken of the intruder’s car as he fled the scene.
The police have not disclosed a motive, and much about the attack remained a mystery on Sunday, including why the assailant chose the rabbi’s house. But governor Andrew M. Cuomo referred to the rampage as an “act of domestic terrorism”.
Late on Sunday afternoon, two family friends of Thomas said he had struggled with mental illness, and one said he was schizophrenic. And a statement issued on Sunday night by the attorney Michael Sussman in the name of the family said that Thomas “had a long history of mental illness and hospitalisations”.
The violence further traumatised the Jewish community in the New York region, coming after a string of anti-Semitic incidents in recent weeks. It occurred weeks after an anti-Semitic mass shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey, left three people dead, including two Hasidic Jews, and after an ultra-Orthodox man was stabbed in Monsey on his way to a local synagogue.
The New York Police Department had already said on Friday that it was stepping up patrols in Jewish neighbourhoods after a series of anti-Semitic incidents last week.
The five victims of Saturday’s attack were taken to the hospital, and four of them were treated there and released. By Sunday afternoon, one remained there with a skull fracture, officials said.
That person, according to Abe Rosenberg, captain of Hatzalah E.M.S., the local emergency response service, is elderly and recently underwent heart surgery. “We are praying for him. But a person this age with critical medical condition, anything can go bad,” he said.
Texas church shooting
Two people were killed and a third was in critical condition after a shooting on Sunday at a church in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas, local authorities said.
The Fort Worth Fire Department said three people, including the person who they believed to be the shooter, were transported from the scene in critical condition.
