NEW YORK – A man has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of three people in random attacks in Manhattan, police said Tuesday.

Ramon Rivera, 51, was taken into custody after he was found with blood on his clothes and two kitchen knives, authorities said. He was awaiting hearing on Tuesday. A message seeking comment was left for the attorney who represented him in a previous case.

“Three New Yorkers. The unprovoked attacks left us searching for answers as to how something like this could happen,” Mayor Eric Adams said at a press conference Monday afternoon.

Investigators were trying to understand what triggered the attack, which occurred over two and a half hours on Monday.

“No words were exchanged. No property was taken. He was just brutally attacked,” said Joseph Kenny, chief of detectives for the New York Police Department. “He walked towards them and started attacking them with knives.”

The first stabbing, on West 19th Street, killed 36-year-old construction worker Angel Lata Landi, who was standing next to a work site near the Hudson River just before 8:30 a.m., police said. About two hours later, on the other side of Manhattan Island, a 68-year-old man was attacked while fishing in the East River near East 30th Street.

Both men died shortly after the stabbings, Kenny said. The fisherman’s name was not immediately released.

The suspect then appears to have traveled north near the riverbank. Around 10:55 a.m., a 36-year-old woman identified as Wilma Augustin was stabbed multiple times near the United Nations headquarters on East 42nd Street, Kenny said. He died at the hospital later Monday, police said.

A passing taxi driver saw the third attack and notified police at nearby First Avenue and East 46th Street, authorities said. Police teams caught the suspect in a short time.

The bloodshed occurred in a major city where, as in other cities, crime has figured prominently in political discourse and daily concerns in the years since pandemic lockdowns have emptied the streets and encouraged disorder. By 2024, homicides in New York City are down 14 percent in two years, but serious assaults are up nearly 12 percent, according to police statistics.

A number of recent stabbings in public places have attracted attention, including a deadly attack at the Coney Island subway station a few weeks ago.

Adams, a Democrat, called Monday’s violence “a clear-cut example” of failures in the criminal justice system and elsewhere.

The suspect in Monday’s attack, who appeared to be homeless, was convicted in a criminal case several months ago and arrested in a grand theft case last month, authorities said.

The attack came three years after a series of stabbings at various points on a subway line killed two people and injured two others within a few hours.

On a Saturday morning in 2019, four people sleeping in doorways and on sidewalks in Chinatown were beaten to death, and a fifth person was seriously injured.