Teen stabbed to death outside East Harlem restaurant remembered as ‘kind soul’

A teen knifed to death outside an East Harlem restaurant was remembered Monday as a helpful neighbor — and the last person they could imagine getting into a senseless street fight.

Carlos Rivas, 17, was much more likely to help a resident carry groceries up the stairs of the Bronx building where he lived with his family than he was to get into a curbside clash with a total stranger.

“He was a very nice kid,” said Rivas’ crying neighbor, Anita Birmingham, 65. “Every time I saw him he was very respectful. He would help everybody. It’s crazy. He was very respectful. He was not one of those kids you saw out in the street getting into difficulty for nothing. He was very family-oriented. I can’t believe it. I would never thought [it would be] him.”

Cops said Rivas and a 22-year-old friend got into a fight on Friday with an older man at an East Harlem Korean restaurant.

The caught-on-camera clash shows the man stabbing Rivas outside the storefront eatery after a scuffle that apparently started as they entered around 6:15 p.m.

Cops arrested Saul Sanchez, 62, and charged him with murder, assault and weapons possession. He was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court Sunday and ordered held without bail.

It was unclear what set off the fight.

Surveillance video shows Rivas’ friend bumping into the suspect when the three entered the restaurant. Moments later, Rivas and his friend are wrestling with the man as they exit the eatery. The older man grabs Rivas by the collar and stabs him in the chest and stomach before both fall to the ground.

As the struggle continues, Rivas’ friend grabs a chair left outside the K-Street Food restaurant, and strikes the stabber over the head with it before jumping on the stabber’s back, the video shows. The stabber ran off when Rivas collapsed.

Cops said Sanchez initially fled the scene before he returned and was arrested. Sanchez claimed he pulled his knife after he was hit on the sidewalk with a chair, according to police. But the video shows that Sanchez was hit with the chair after the stabbing and that Rivas’ friend used the chair to try to defend Rivas from the attack.

“The video of the incident … shows two young men fighting with a 62-year-old man,” Sanchez’ lawyer, Kenneth Gilbert, told the Daily News Monday. “I have spoken to several of his friends and neighbors who say very dear things about him. Mr. Sanchez is very remorseful about what has happened.”

Gilbert said Sanchez went home to wash the blood off his face and to bring his dog home, although no dog appears in any of the videos. He returned 15 minutes later, according to prosecutors. Gilbert said Sanchez suffered a cut to his head during the fight. He appeared in court with a bandage wrapped around his head.

Medics took Rivas to Harlem Hospital but he couldn’t be saved, cops said. The friend, who was stabbed in the left arm, was also taken to an area hospital.

Sanchez had no prior criminal record.

Gilbert said Sanchez, whose mother is suffering from dementia, was the sole breadwinner, and has been happily married for years.

Friends and neighbors said they had a hard time connecting Rivas to the clash.

“I’m heartbroken,” said a neighbor named Caprice, 35. ”He’s never in the way of anybody. He’s never into trouble. He’s very quiet. I’m completely shocked and heartbroken. We lost a good young man in the community.”

Another neighbor, Joanna Sosa, 36, said his daughter and Rivas were close friends. Sosa was taping laminated pictures of Rivas to a cardboard poster board that she left in the lobby so friends and neighbors could scribble personal tributes to the teen.

“That way his mom can have this as something to understand and see how much he really was loved and cared for,” Sosa said. “He was a kind soul. If anybody needed help with groceries, older people, even me — he would help me out.”

Sosa said she was struggling to understand the stabbing.

“No matter what the situation is, let’s say if they bumped into you or it’s a tight space, you have to be more conscious of the fact that you can’t be walking around with so much anger and so much hatred so you get to that point of killing a child,” she said.

“Maybe you didn’t have the intention of killing him but at the end of the day you have to understand that you’re using a weapon against somebody and this child had no weapons on him.”

The horrific stabbing was hauntingly similar to the murder of on-duty postal worker Ray Hodges, who was knifed to death in a Harlem deli a day earlier during an argument over his spot on a sandwich line, cops said.

Hodges, a USPS mail carrier who worked out of the Morningside post office in Harlem, was stabbed by 28-year-old Jaia Cruz at Joe’s Grocery on Lenox Ave. near W. 118th St. at about 2:30 p.m. Thursday, police said.

Originally Published: January 6, 2025 at 6:51 PM EST