One Sunday morning in October 2007, I woke up without having seen someone brutally stabbed for the last time. I was 16, and along with a few other friends, I had stayed over at my friend Peter’s house in east Midtown Manhattan. Peter’s father took us all out for breakfast at a diner on nearby 2nd Avenue and 35th Street, and as the scrambled eggs showed up, there was a commotion outside. Thirty-eight-year-old Lee Coleman, schizophrenic and bipolar, was on top of psychologist Susan Barron, 67, who had the leash of her small dog around her wrist. He was stabbing away, methodically plunging one of four kitchen knives into her all over, and then putting one knife down and switching to another. 

What felt like both a short time and a lifetime later, a gun went off. Off-duty police officer Gregory Chin shot Coleman. Police and ambulances arrived. My friends watched rapt and I took off. I vividly remember not wanting to watch anyone die, though I learned from the cover story of the New York Post the next day, “SECOND AVENUE SLASHER,” that Barron had survived the dozens of knife wounds and was in intensive care and Coleman survived the bullet. I learned just as I was writing this that Coleman’s family had tried to warn police that the soon-to-be slasher was dangerous and off his meds. “Coleman’s brother, Craig, said that in the hours before the attack,” the New York Post reported the next day, “Lee had been babbling about ‘demons.’”