Teen arrested for Times Square murder threw urine on victim, was on crime ‘rampage’: prosecutors 30%
By Rocco Parascandola53% Kerry Burke33% Emma Seiwell50% Colin Mixson62% Thomas Tracy41%
5/7/2026, 4:18:50 PM
Topics: Nyc Crime
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Authority, and Anecdotal, with Unattributed Quote as the most egregious example at 39.4% saturation with 372 hits. Analysis detected 2,274 faulty-reasoning hits from 944 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 40.4% and a BS Rank of 30% (14,254 of 20,271 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 70.30% of the article peer group.
A 17-year-old boy arrested Thursday for a fatal Times Square stabbing inspired by a TikTok trend tossed urine on his victim before chasing him down and plunging a knife into his chest, prosecutors said.
Leonides Baez, 39, was sleeping on the sidewalk outside of Burger & Lobster restaurant on Monday when the teen and two friends woke him up and began harassing him, at one point urinating in a cup and throwing it on the victim, Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran said at the teen’s arraignment.
The teen suspect later admitted that he zeroed in on Baez because he was following a “mess-with-a-crack-head” trend on TikTok, a police source said.
The suspect shouted at reporters as he awaited arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court Thursday afternoon, saying, “It was self-defense, p—y!
Suck my d–k!
… It was self-defense!”
The suspect told the Daily News, “He punched me in my face first — so it was an act of self-defense.”
And he bluntly admitted he stabbed the man.
“He punched me first — so I stabbed him,” he said.
“He’s a grown man beating up on kids.”
Asked by The News if he was part of the twisted TikTok trend, he said, “I’m not part of it, I’m just hanging out.”
Asked if he thought the victim had a weapon, he said, “I don’t know if he had a weapon, I was scared.”
A woman whom the suspect called “Mom,” but who identified herself to the Daily News as his girlfriend’s mother, Genniett Torres, wept in the gallery during the youth’s arraignment.
“He lives with me,” Torres said.
“I’m going to do an investigation of this case.
He’s a minor.
You can’t touch a minor with a case.”
Video obtained by police shows the teen suspect drawing a knife from his vest pocket and chasing the victim into a breezeway, where he stabbed him in the chest, court documents show.
Footage of the slaying was shown to a school safety officer at Manhattan High School in Hell’s Kitchen, who recognized the teen as a student he’d interacted with on numerous occasions over the past two years, according to a criminal complaint.
The teen, whose name was not released by the NYPD because he’s underage, was caught jumping a turnstile at the Stillwell Ave. station in Coney Island just after midnight early on Thursday.
Cops quickly realized he was wanted for Monday’s 11:30 p.m. stabbing on W. 43rd St. near Seventh Ave. and charged him with murder and weapons possession.
He was ordered held without bail after pleading not guilty at his arraignment.
Police recovered a scalpel from the teen, but it wasn’t immediately clear if it was the murder weapon.
The teen suspect was also charged Thursday in a string of violent robberies and slashings targeting retailers in Midtown.
In one case, the victim told police he confronted the teen and three of his friends after they began looting his souvenir shop on W. 40th St. near Seventh Ave. around 9:35 p.m. on April 7, court documents show.
“I’m gonna cut your face,” the teen allegedly screamed, before cutting the merchant’s right hand and fleeing the store.
And on May 3 — the day before he allegedly killed Baez — the suspect and three other teens pilfered a Seventh Ave. newsstand near W. 54th St. in Midtown around 3 a.m., according to a complaint.
At one point, the teens broke a glass window, and the suspect snatched $300 as the kiosk’s terrified operator cowered inside.
The teen and his friends then left, but the suspect returned to the newsstand around 10:15 p.m. that evening and tried to sneak inside, but was scared off by a man busy fixing the stand’s broken door.
The teen then got into a fight involving several people on the sidewalk before slashing a man in the chest, court documents show.
Yoran said of the senseless Times Square fatal stabbing, “This is a part of a sort of rampage, I would say, of behavior by the defendant in the days and months leading up to this incident.”
Baez was stabbed in the face, torso and back, cops said.
The teen is not believed to have recorded the slaying, police sources say.
The slaying follows an attack inspired by social media on April 27 in Binghamton, N.Y., where Peter Bennedum, a 45-year-old homeless man, was beaten to death by a group of five teens between the ages of 13 and 15, according to local news reports.
Content creators have drawn criticism for online pranks targeting homeless people, including an LA-based YouTuber deplatformed after posting videos in which he offered a homeless man food only to eat it in front of him.
In another instance, a drone channel called “BumsNDrones was kicked off Facebook, YouTube and TikTok after posting footage of drones dive bombing homeless men while blasting music, according to a newsblog for drone enthusiasts.
Medics rushed Baez to Bellevue Hospital but he could not be saved.
His sister described Baez, who grew up in Worcester, Mass., as a free-spirited “wanderer” who was homeless by choice.
“He was such a loving person,” the sister, who declined to give her name, said of her free-spirited brother in an exclusive interview.
“He was loved by everybody.”
The attackers ran off east on W. 43rd St. toward Bryant Park.
Cops are still looking for two accomplices but believe the teen is the stabber.
“Why?
What was the point?”
his sister said of the slaying.
“Were you that bored that you had to bother somebody?
You getting brownie points to dehumanize somebody?”
Speakers
2speakers12%attributed speech830writer words
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100%flagged-word coverageDafna Yoran
88 attributed words77% of attributed speech91% writer coverage
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