A volunteer medic with the Hatzolah emergency medical response organization was knifed in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section on Tuesday evening. The attacker escaped.
David Katz, 34, was stabbed in the back by a man who sneaked up and ambushed him from behind at around 8:20 pm on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Rogers Avenue.
The masked stabber who fled the scene was described as a six-foot-tall black male. It is not yet clear whether the attack was racially or simply criminally motivated, or had some connection to the radical Islamist attacks taking place in Israel in the current wave of terror.
Katz radioed fellow Hatzolah members for help. Those who responded treated the injured victim for stab wounds to the upper right side of his back before evacuating him to Kings County Hospital in serious but stable condition.
Investigators from the NYPD Intelligence Division & Counter-terrorism Bureau are working on the attack with the Hate Crimes Task Force and are scrutinizing CCTV footage from the area.
Crown Heights is a mixed-ethnic integrated community comprised of Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidic Jews, Carribean-American, African-American and Latin-American Jews.