Brooklyn Child Stabbing Suspect Charged With Murder

About 100 spectators jeered as suspect Daniel St. Hubert was escorted from a police precinct in Williamsburg on Thursday

The 27-year-old parolee arrested in the stabbings of two Brooklyn children in an elevator over the weekend was formally charged late Thursday with murdering the 6-year-old boy who later died of his injuries and attempting to murder the 7-year-old girl who suffered a collapsed lung in the attack.

Daniel St. Hubert was also charged with assault and criminal possession of a weapon before a judge ordered he be held without bail. A public defender represented St. Hubert at the hearing, and the suspect reserved rights to make a bail argument at a later date.

When St. Hubert was escorted out of a police precinct in Williamsburg Thursday evening, a crowd of about 100 people waiting outside erupted into angry jeers.

At his arraignment, prosecutors said that police made a preliminary DNA match on the knife used in the attack on 6-year-old Prince Joshua "PJ" Avitto and his 7-year-old playmate Mikayla Capers in a building on Schenck Avenue in East New York.  Hundreds mourned Avitto Friday during a service in East New York. 

The children were both stabbed with a steak knife in the torso, and were believed to be on their way to get frozen treats.

A funeral for Avitto is set for Friday.

Aricka McClinton, the mother of PJ Avitto, publicly thanked police after St. Hubert's arrest. 

Police are also looking into whether he may be connected to two other stabbings, including one in a Chelsea subway station three days later, authorities say.

Police are reviewing video that could link St. Hubert, who was arrested in the Ozone Park section of Queens Wednesday night, to the knife attack on a 53-year-old man on the southbound platform of the No. 1 train at the 18th Street station early that morning. 

A police spokesman told the Associated Press surveillance video appears to show Hubert near the subway station where the man was stabbed, and that witnesses described a man fitting his description on the platform where the attack occurred. 

Investigators have said the attacks appeared to be random, and may also be linked to the deadly stabbing of a teen blocks away two days earlier.

Mayor de Blasio said Thursday there isn't yet sufficient evidence to confirm St. Hubert is the likely suspect in the stabbing death of Tanaya Grant-Copeland, but there is a "strong likelihood." 

St. Hubert was arrested hours after authorities identified him as the suspect in the elevator attack that left a 6-year-old dead and critically injured a 7-year-old. Investigators had received a tip about a cell phone St. Hubert had that enabled them to track the phone's pings, the official said. That in part led police to start staking out at the home of someone St. Hubert knew. He was carrying another kitchen knife with him when he was found, the official said.

St. Hubert was paroled on May 23 for domestic assault, and has a violent past that includes attacks on a corrections officer and a police officer, authorities said at a news conference Wednesday evening.

He's been arrested nine times in the past, and was committed to a psychiatric facility three different times as he awaited trial in two different assault cases between April 2010 and November 2011, according to court records. 

In June 2012, St. Hubert pleaded guilty to the two assaults -- one on his mother in May 2009, and one on a correction officer in February 2010 -- and was sentenced to five years in prison and two years in prison for each conviction, respectively.

He was allowed to serve the sentences concurrently, and after being credited time served, he was out on parole by May 2014. 

After failing to show up at a parole meeting Wednesday, St. Hubert was questioned and ticketed by police. Those officers talked to the man before he was identified as a suspect in the stabbings.

"This is probably someone who has severe mental health problems," de Blasio said Thursday. "Our country doesn't devote enough resources to it." 

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