BUS-STOP SLAYING
A poet and activist was fatally stabbed in front of his girlfriend at a Brooklyn bus stop early Monday by an unhinged man who snapped, “What are you looking at?” before attacking, cops and pals said.
Ryan Carson, 32, and his girlfriend had just left a wedding when he was stabbed multiple times in the chest by the stranger around 4 a.m. as the couple waited at the B38 bus stop at Lafayette Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, police and sources said.
“It’s a horrific, brutal murder of someone who worked piously to help make this city a better place,” said Carson’s grieving Bed-Stuy
roommate, Tom Krantz, who had known the victim since 2012.
Carson — who came from the Boston area in 2010 to attend Pratt Institute — was an activist focused on sustainability and environmental policies, Krantz, 31, said.
His killer — who had not been caught Monday — was acting erratically and knocking over scooters before he seethed to Carson, “What are you looking at?” and attacked him, sources said.
Carson’s girlfriend held him in her arms before he was rushed to Kings County Hospital Center, where he could not be saved, according to cops and sources.
Krantz said it was remarkable “how much he actually did for the entire city and for his friends.”
“He’s really . . . like the epicenter
of an entire community that he created, that he brought together,” he said. “I don’t think anyone is exaggerating when they say he would give the shirt off his back.”
Carson, who had a “heart” for organizing people around a cause, was inspired into activism by his parents, Krantz said, noting, “His mom is a tugboat captain, so she always volunteered in the community and was very active in organizing in her own community.”
Carson was “gregarious” and often the “loudest and smartest guy in the room,” Krantz recalled.
He once walked 500 miles across New York “to raise awareness to pass legislation for the institution of the first overdose prevention facility in the state,” said former classmate Alex Harristhal, 29.
He also was a published poet, whose works included a poem called “Anxiety” about fears over his own death and the “inconvenience” it would cause others.
“That it could come while someone waits for me, that I couldn’t call to let them know I was held up,” he wrote in the poem.
Acadia Cutschall, 32, who attended school with Carson, went to his stoop to mourn the death of her “best friend.”
“I was present once when he literally talked a guy out of mugging him,” Cutschall said. “He gave him some money.”
She said if Carson had the chance, he may have lent a hand to his killer: “He would probably help out a guy like that.”