An apparent battle between two mentally ill people in San Jose yesterday ended with one slitting the other's throat with a samurai sword, and killing her. Things began with an incident yesterday morning at a Starbucks on West San Carlos Street, in which an obviously disturbed man saw a homeless woman staring at him through the front window of the store. He flipped a table, stormed out screaming "No! Don't do that to me!" This seems to have sparked a later, very violent incident outside a nearby Walgreens in which he returned to the neighborhood and murdered the woman in front of multiple witnesses, with a samurai sword. The reason: He thought she was trying to "put a black voodoo spell" on him.

Witnesses say that at 6:45 p.m. Monday night the suspect stepped off a city bus outside the Walgreens where he slit the woman's throat with the sword. Several people chased the man through the store, and he eventually came back out to the street where he stabbed the woman several times before fleeing. The suspect remains on the loose, and police have not yet released a description of him.

The victim was a homeless woman, known to some as The Screaming Lady, who was a fixture in the neighborhood. She frequently sat outside this same Walgreens and yelled threatening things at people.

"Even though she wasn't all that friendly, she was still a big part of the neighborhood," says local resident Michael White.

This incident capped off a violent day in San Jose, which also included two other fatal shootings in other parts of town. Also, this incident follows on another unusual homicide in San Jose earlier this year in which a woman killed her mother-in-law with a machete.

[ABC 7]