Early Sunday morning in New York’s Park Slope neighborhood, 19-year-old twins Samyia and Sanyia Spain were stabbed by an unknown assailant following an altercation. The sisters were taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist hospital, where Samyia died and Sanyia was released after being treated for her injuries.
Sanyia said in an interview with the New York Daily News that the attacker made advances towards both girls, and violently retaliated when they declined. The teens were with a group of friends and relatives inside a bodega moments before the stabbings occurred.
The twins had been at a family game night when they decided to walk along with their brother to the store Slope Natural Plus for a snack, according to Sanyia. After Samyia refused to give her phone number to the unknown man, who appeared drunk, he became irate, Sanyia said. He argued with the teens before leaving the bodega and returning minutes later.
“He pushed little Samyia, and then I pushed him,” Sanyia told the Post. “And then everybody else started pushing him out the door.”
The employee working at the bodega kicked the man and his associates out and locked the door behind them. Later, when the Spain sisters’ crew prepared to depart, the employee unlocked the door, let them out and locked the door behind them.
The aggressor and his party, however, had not left the area. Sanyia saw the man and two of his group standing close by, with the attacker holding a knife.
“He had a knife in his hand and was saying: ‘I’m gonna stab y’all in the face,’” Sanyia told the Post. “I’m telling everyone to back up. And he pushed little Samyia to the ground.”
The twins’ older brother punched the attacker in the face, causing him to fall to the ground. From there, the two groups began fighting. During the altercation, Sanyia was stabbed in the arm and Samyia was stabbed in the chest and neck, later succumbing to her injuries.
This is not the first time a violent attack has happened at the bodega. Three years ago, Nichelle Thomas, who was 52, was shot to death by her ex-girlfriend in front of the store, in a killing that was caught on video.
No arrests have been made in the Spain sisters’ case, though the investigation is ongoing, police said.
Rejection killings, or, instances in which people, typically women or girls, are killed for rejecting a man’s romantic or sexual advances are not widely tracked. While these events are sometimes included in domestic violence statistics, which are also poorly tracked and documented, they are inconsistently differentiated from other types of intimate violence.
According to the Violence Policy Center, more than 45,000 women and girls were killed by males from 1996 to 2020. A 2020 report noted that Black women and other women of color are disproportionately affected by homicide at the hands of men.
