Police have arrested a 27-year-old man on parole for assault in the stabbings of two children in a Brooklyn elevator, a law enforcement official says.
Daniel St. Hubert (photo below) was arrested in Jamaica, Queens, shortly after police identified him as a suspect in the Brooklyn stabbings at a news conference, according to the official.
St. Hubert was paroled on May 23 for domestic assault, and has a violent past that includes attacks on a corrections officer and a police officer, authorities said at a news conference Wednesday evening.
Law enforcement sources told NBC 4 New York earlier that police made a preliminary DNA match on the knife used in the attack on 6-year-old Prince Joshua Avitto and his 7-year-old playmate Mikayla Capers. The boy was killed in the brutal stabbing and the girl was critically injured.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton would only say that police had forensic evidence linking St. Hubert to the crime.
Investigators have said the attack appeared to be random, and may be linked to the deadly stabbing of a teen blocks away two days earlier.
The suspect attacked the children with a steak knife in the building on Schenck Avenue in East New York, police said. They were both stabbed in the torso, and were believed to be on their way to get frozen treats.
The little girl has a collapsed lung and is fighting for her life, her family said.
Dozens of officers have been assigned to the corner of Schenck and Stanley avenues in one of New York's most violent neighborhoods as part of the investigation.
