The wife of a street vendor stabbed Wednesday near the Pico/Aliso Metro Station is pleading for justice for her husband, as an online fundraising campaign has already exceeded its goal to help the recovering victim and his family.
Police told ABC7 that the vicious attack, caught on video and posted on social media, was unprovoked. The man stabbed is a popular churro vendor named Ignacio Torres; his age was not given. The video shows Torres getting knocked to the ground and the suspect stabbing him repeatedly.
Police have identified the attacker as 28-year-old Michael Ramírez. He was detained shortly after the attack, when a witness pointed him out to police.
ABC7 reported the stabbing happened around 5 pm near 1st and Gabriel García Marquez streets – about a block from Méndez High School. Torres’ daughter Dulce Terrazas told ABC7 that her father has wounds in his stomach, arm, back and leg. He is expected to make a full recovery.
“Unfortunately the puncture to his stomach led to a laceration on his liver,” Terrazas wrote on the Gofundme page she set up for her parents. “I don’t know how long his recovery will be or what might happen but my mom needs to maintain the home while he’s recovering.”
As of Friday, the Gofundme page had raised over $9,500, well over its $2,000 goal.
In an interview with ABC7 on Thursday, Torres’s wife Socorro Serrano said she witnessed the attack and tried to stop it. She said Ramírez first attacked another vendor, who sells raspados at that location, but that he was able to get away. He then turned to Torres, who fell to the ground as he tried to escape.
Serrano said that she yelled at the man asking him to stop, and that she was disheartened by the fact that none of the witnesses stepped up to help her husband.
“I want justice for what they did to my husband,” Serrano told reporter Eric Resendiz in Spanish.
Police told ABC7 that Ramírez, the suspect, is a transient with a criminal history that includes arrests for assault and battery.
