A New York man has been charged with murder after attacking four homeless people with sticks during a rampage in downtown Miami on Thursday morning, killing two and injuring two others in what the police called a horrible “display of unprovoked violence.”
Shortly before 6 a.m. on Thursday, the man, Brenton Clarke, 36, of Inwood, N.Y., on Long Island, beat four homeless people with a metal rod and a wooden stick and stole a victim’s belongings, law enforcement officials said.
Mr. Clarke was charged with two counts each of first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder, and a single count of armed robbery with a deadly weapon, the Miami Police Department said on Friday.
The motive for the attack was not immediately clear, the police said.
Two of the homeless people died at the scene of the attack. The two people who were injured were taken to a trauma center for treatment, the police said. Their conditions were not available.
Mr. Clarke was walking in downtown Miami at around 5 a.m. Thursday when he saw a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk and stared at him, the police’s affidavit said.
About 40 minutes later, Mr. Clarke returned to the area and used a metal rod to attack two other homeless people who were sleeping and then began beating the person he had seen earlier that morning, the affidavit said. He later beat a fourth homeless person who was sleeping nearby, according to the police.
People in the downtown Miami area alerted the police, and one armed witness confronted Mr. Clarke, the police’s affidavit said.
Mr. Clarke ran from that witness, but the police, using witness descriptions and footage from security cameras, eventually found him. Mr. Clarke’s clothes had “wet stains,” which were later determined to be blood, the affidavit said.
Manuel A. Morales, the chief of police for the Miami Police Department, said at a news conference on Thursday that the suspect did not have an arrest history in Miami, but had “minor criminal run-ins with the police” in New York.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Clarke had a lawyer.
“This is a horrible incident,” Chief Morales said.
The Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, the county’s leading homeless outreach group, said in a statement that it was grieving the “senseless loss of these lives” and thanked the police for their swift response.
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