Stabbing near officers planting flowers with children prompts neighborhood ‘peace rally’
As police were planting flowers in a downtown community Tuesday afternoon with help from neighborhood children, a woman was stabbed in the heart around the corner.
Another woman was arrested in connection with the stabbing that afternoon, but the juxtaposition of the violence so close to a beautification project bothered police, prompting them to host a community event in the neighborhood Thursday afternoon.
“Officers are constantly working on projects like that in the community — beautification projects to try and get rid of some blight,” said Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Laura Meltzer. “We’ve had some pretty serious violent calls down in that area, and when we have those types of things occur we get the community involved and we have these events.”
When officers heard the nearby commotion Tuesday just after 3 p.m., they rushed to intervene and found the woman lying in a pool of blood in the 2200 block of Sunrise Avenue, near Fremont Street and Eastern Avenue.
One immediately tried to help the woman while medics were on the way.
She was taken to University Medical Center where trauma doctors were able to repair her heart, but she remained in critical condition Thursday.
At the time, the other officer walked up to Corey Taylor, 32, a woman who was standing nearby and whom witnesses quickly identified as a suspect, according to her eventual arrest report.
Surveillance video from an apartment complex showed both the stabbing itself and a confrontation between the two women earlier in the day, and police arrested Taylor, who may have been high on methamphetamine at the time, according to the report.
The video reportedly shows Taylor confronting the woman, then lunging toward her. The woman can be seen clutching her chest as Taylor runs off, tossing a small object in between two apartment buildings on her way.
It was there police said they found a knife Taylor had been given earlier: a small, 4-inch blade with a blonde, wooden-block handle.
Taylor was booked on a charge of attempted murder with a deadly weapon. She is being held without bail and will be in court today.
On Thursday, officers hosted what they called a “Peace Rally” on the corner of 15th and Fremont streets, a half-mile west of where the stabbing happened.
When they announced the event, police referenced a handful of other violent events in the area, including a drive-by shooting Feb. 26 that left one man shot more than a dozen times on 14th and Fremont streets, though he survived.
The rally included mounted police, a barbecue and a “peace walk” with officers to “show support of residents and a message of unity,” Meltzer said.
“Every once in awhile, you’re out making those community contacts and you happen to be in the right place at the right time,” she said of Tuesday’s stabbing.
As detectives investigated the stabbing that afternoon, with reporters waiting nearby for information, the officers who had been planting flowers walked back to where they’d been working and started joking and playing with children from the neighborhood around the corner from the crime scene tape.
Contact Rachel Crosby at rcrosby@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290. Find her on Twitter: @rachelacrosby
