A man was slashed in the face in SoHo on Thursday afternoon as he walked out of a store, police said, just 18 hours after a waiter was slashed in a Greenwich Village restaurant.
The 21-year-old SoHo victim was walking out of Supreme, a men’s clothing store on Lafayette Street, about 2 p.m. when the suspect ambushed him and slashed his right cheek with an unknown weapon, police said.
The store held a sale Thursday afternoon, a law enforcement official said, and the victim — who is friends with the owners — was allowed to skip the line. Investigators are looking into whether that slight is what provoked the suspect, who was described as being in his 20s.
The suspect didn’t take any of the man’s purchases and ran south on Lafayette Street, police said. The victim was taken to a local hospital in stable condition.
An earlier assault on a waiter happened at about 8 p.m. at Silver Spurs, a restaurant on LaGuardia Place, police said.
Police said that the male suspect, believed to be 15-17 years old, entered the restaurant and began harassing patrons and asking for donations for a basketball team. The 25-year-old male waiter asked the suspect to leave and he did, but not before telling the waiter that he’d be back, police said.
The suspect returned between five and 10 minutes later and approached the waiter, who again asked him to leave, according to police. When the two arrived at the restaurant’s vestibule, the suspect slashed the victim in the face and then fled on foot.
The waiter was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he got 120 stitches in the left side of his face. He has since been released from the hospital, police said.
They said that the suspect is believed to have braces. He was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and dark jeans, and he was carrying a purple folder at the time of the attack, police said.
No arrests have been made.
As yet more slashings plagued the city, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton on Thursday said he wasn’t surprised people may be feeling unnerved.
“It’s understandable,” he said, speaking at police headquarters at an unrelated news conference. “The concern of the random nature of it, the unpredictability of it, if you will.”
