A 14-year-old girl was rushed to the hospital Tuesday, after a man stabbed her in the face as she walked to school.
The East Bay Times reports that the attack occurred at 8:52 a.m. Tuesday, as the child walked on the 400 block of 29th Street, which is between Telegraph Avenue and Broadway in Oakland.
According to CBS 5, the victim had just started her freshman year at Oakland Emiliano Zapata Street Academy, an alternative school located at 417 29th Street.
That's where she was headed when classmate Jasmine Gaona tells CBS 5 that she saw the victim "bleeding from the face as a man with a large knife stood by."
“Her face was just leaking and there was a guy that was just running with a knife about this long,” Gaona told CBS 5, as she held her hands about a foot apart.
The suspect confronted the victim on the sidewalk, then began stabbing her in the face, police say. Employees at a nearby nursing home intervened, CBS 5 reports, turning the attacker's attention from the child and toward themselves.
“He just charged at them," a nursing home spokesperson told CBS 5. "They obviously retreated. They shut the doors and it was enough to where just shutting the doors — for some reason — just stopped him in his path.”
According to the EBT, the suspect then fled, but "witnesses followed him to the 3000 block of Summit Street," where police arrested him. As of Wednesday morning, the suspect had not been publicly identified, but a police spokesperson says officers "recovered some knives that were found near where the suspect was arrested."
The victim was rushed to a nearby hospital, and is in stable condition, CBS 5 reports.
Speaking with CBS 5, Oakland Police Department spokesperson Marco Marquez says that “It appears that it was a random attack. It also appears that the suspect and the victim are unknown to each other.” As of Wednesday morning, the EBT reports, police are still "trying to determine a motive" in the stabbing.
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