Two 15-year-old boys were stabbed outside a storefront at 1531 Fulton Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the afternoon of Monday, August 31, after a verbal dispute with an unidentified man turned violent. One teen was stabbed once in the left thigh and the other once in the left abdomen before the attacker fled on foot, and he remains at large more than two weeks later.
According to NYPD Crime Stoppers
, the confrontation began around 4:30 p.m. when the two teenage victims got into a verbal dispute with the unidentified male, which escalated into a physical altercation. The man used an unknown sharp object to stab both boys before running north on Throop Avenue, according to the same NYPD Crime Stoppers alert. That escape route carried him off the busy Fulton Street retail strip and into the surrounding residential blocks, a stretch of the neighborhood that sits directly at the intersection of Fulton Street and Throop Avenue, per
Cinema Treasures
.
NYPD Crime Stoppers is offering a reward of up to $3,500 for information leading to an arrest and indictment in the case. Anyone with details is asked to call the Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477), or the Spanish-language line at 1-888-57-PISTA (74782); tips can also be submitted through the agency's website or its X account, @NYPDTips.
A Reward Funded Outside City Budgets
That cash reward isn't paid for with tax dollars. It's administered by the nonprofit New York City Police Foundation through private donations, and under the program's guidelines, the money only goes out once a tip leads directly to both an arrest and a formal felony indictment, according to the New York City Police Foundation. The public-private partnership has paid out more than $3 million in rewards since it launched in 1983.
If the suspect is caught and the injuries are confirmed to have resulted from a sharp object, New York law offers a clear roadmap for prosecutors. Under New York Penal Law § 120.05(2), inflicting physical injury on someone with a sharp object or dangerous instrument is classified as second-degree assault, a Class D violent felony carrying a mandatory minimum of two years in state prison and a maximum of up to seven, according to the Fast Law Firm. Any case stemming from the 79th Precinct would ultimately land with the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, which works directly with precinct detectives on felony assault indictments and, in one recent case from October 2025, secured a 23-year-to-life sentence in a second-degree murder and weapon possession conviction tied to an assault investigation run jointly with the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, per the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office.
A Corner With a Violent History
The address itself carries grim local weight. In August 2022, 1531 Fulton Street was the site of a fatal shooting that drew citywide attention when 23-year-old McDonald's employee Matthew Webb was shot outside the building during an altercation that reportedly began over cold French fries, according to Law & Crime. Webb later died from his injuries, and the shooter was indicted on murder charges.
The teen stabbing was one of several separate stabbings reported in the surrounding precinct this year. Three weeks earlier, on August 6, a 26-year-old woman was stabbed multiple times during a verbal dispute inside a store at 894 Myrtle Avenue, also within the 79th Precinct — an attack that remains unsolved. And in May, a man was found with multiple knife wounds at Bainbridge Street and Howard Avenue before dying at Interfaith Medical Center.
Crime Data Paints a Mixed Picture
Precinct-level numbers back up the sense of strain. Major crime in the 79th Precinct rose more than 2% in early 2026 compared with the same period the year before, driven largely by a 94.7% surge in reported robberies during January and February, according to Patch. The precinct covers western Bedford-Stuyvesant, west of Marcus Garvey Boulevard.
Citywide, the trend lines diverge in an important way. Homicides and shooting incidents have dropped to historic lows through the middle of 2026, but felony assaults — nonfatal violent altercations, often involving knives or other weapons — remain the primary category of major violent crime still climbing, staying more than 30% above pre-pandemic baselines, according to the nonprofit research organization Vital City. The Fulton Street stabbing fits that broader pattern: a verbal dispute that escalated into a knife attack before the attacker vanished on foot, leaving detectives to work the case without a name.
