Two years ago, as they strolled Times Square together, two carefree young tourists from Canada almost lost their lives when a deranged stranger randomly stabbed first one of them, and then the other, square in the back.
Yesterday, the two women told a Manhattan jury about the blood, the terror and the knifeman’s piercing eyes – all the while bravely facing the accused stabber as he stared at them from the defense table, smiling slightly.
“It was horrible,” Melanie Carrier, 25, the most seriously injured of the two, said later of confronting defendant Kenny Alexis.
The Haitian-born schizophrenic is charged with plunging the 4-inch blade of his steel, camouflage-patterned folding knife into four people, nearly killing them, in the June 2006 Manhattan stabbing spree.
For Carrier, a Montreal bartender, just the sight of Alexis from the witness stand reduced her to audible sobs.
“I look at him in court, and I know it is him,” she explained afterward, in a heavy French accent. “It was his eyes.”
Carrier and her good friend, Audrey Perrier, 28, a flight attendant, had been out walking past the W Hotel on West 47th Street. It was 3 a.m., and they were heading for McDonalds for a late snack.
“What’s up, girls?” came a voice.
The whites of the man’s eyes seemed to leap out from the darkness as he asked the question, Carrier told jurors, speaking through an interpreter. Their eyes met. She turned away. Then it seemed her back was freezing and on fire at the same time.
“I put my hand to my back, and I had blood on my hand,” she said, looking at her hand again, holding it out to jurors.
“He stabbed me; then he stabbed Audrey. I looked at my hand. I had blood on my hand. I looked at Audrey, and she had blood. I remembered I had a lot of blood.”
The knife had sliced into her spine, cutting through both the sheath and the membrane that protect the precious spinal cord. Had the blade sliced a little as one millimeter deeper into her spine, she’d have been paralyzed.
“It’s a bad memory for me,” said Carrier, as she and Perrier left court. “I was very lucky to be able to walk to the witness stand.”
“We wanted to be here,” added Perrier, who also testified yesterday. “To make sure he goes to jail.”
Carrier agreed, “I hope he is going to jail for a long time.”
Alexis is arguing that he didn’t do it, but if he did, he was too crazy to be responsible for his actions.
Prosecutors say that by the time he stabbed Carrier and Perrier, he had already been rampaging for 13 hours.
He’s charged with stabbing a young male tourist from Texas in the chest on a downtown C train at 110th Street, then stabbing a Mexican kitchen worker on the D train platform at Rockefeller Center.