Accused Grand Central stabber was stalker who belonged in jail or psych ward: ex-girlfriend
The unhinged vagrant accused of randomly stabbing two teen tourists at Grand Central Station was a stalker who suffered from paranoid delusions and was in dire need of psychiatric help, his ex-girlfriend told The Post Wednesday.
Charisma Knight, 37, said onetime beau Steven Hutcherson allegedly threatened to kill her “at least five times” in the past year and became increasingly deranged after he refused to take his meds for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
“I called the police all the time and said ‘he’s bipolar and schizophrenic, ‘he needs help, he needs help.’ These people actually do need help. If you’re just letting them go… he might just kill somebody,” Knight said from her East Harlem apartment.
“He should have been in a mental institution where he cannot come out and they can monitor him taking his medication,” she added.
Knight and Hutcherson, 36, met in elementary school and dated for three months in 2021 and then again for nine months, until October 2022, she said.
Hutcherson told her about his diagnoses, and how he was prescribed medication — but would refuse to take it, Knight said.
“I feel like sometimes he wants to die,” she said. “He says and does these things to people because he wants them to react so that he doesn’t have to kill himself.”
Her ex had a penchant for conspiracy theories, watching videos on YouTube about Malcolm X, wars and “how to train to fight with a knife,” Knight said.
“He swore the government was after him,” she said.
“I knew this was gonna happen because if you look at his Facebook account with all the rants that he’s doing with the police, it’s crazy,” Knight added, referring to the Grand Central attack.
At one point, he thought mold growing in his bathroom was planted by the police, and also suspected a close friend of being an FBI informant, Knight recalled.
“When he would go to work some days I would stay at his house and just be in his house until he gets home. He’ll come back and be like, ‘somethings funny with this seasoning,’ or ‘Something’s funny with the creamer. I think the FBI came in and put something in my coffee,'” she said.
“I would tell him it wasn’t true because I was in the house all day.”
She said Hutcherson’s mental health got progressively worse, noting he stopped working at his job at a Panera Bread in the Bronx in late 2021 after suspecting a coworker had called the Bloods gang to beat him up.
Hutcherson was estranged from his mother but never recovered from her death some two decades ago — sparking a particular disdain for the holidays, Knight said.
She theorized that may have contributed to his alleged violent outburst on Christmas Day, when he is accused of stabbing the teens sisters, 14 and 16, in a French restaurant at the Grand Central dining concourse.
“He gets depressed around the holidays. Around October he starts thinking about his mom and thinking about how he has no one. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas he’s weird — extremely weird,” she said.
“Being that it was Christmas, it triggered something in him, whether he was mad that it was like a family setting that they were having and they was enjoying themselves,” she opined.
Knight obtained an order of protection against Hutcherson last year, and said he allegedly threatened to kill her and once even told her mother “I’ma kill your daughter.”
He also sent her rambling text and online messages, some about his more-brazen alter ego, dubbed “Sity Slicker,” she said.
In their most recent encounter on Dec. 1, Hutcherson allegedly showed up in the lobby of her building with flowers and soup, surprising her while she waited for the elevator and telling her, “I have money now. I just want to talk” — prompting her to call the cops.
Nine days later, she found a note on her door signed “Sity Slicker,” she said.
Hutcherson — who has at least 17 arrests on his rap sheet and been subject to a slew of 911 calls for mentally disturbed behavior — is behind held at Rikers Island without bail on attempted murder as a hate crime and other charges for Monday’s attack.
“If he would have got the right help that he needed, and either stayed in jail and got psychiatric help, or in a mental institution and getting help, this would never have happened,” Knight said.
“The girls would never have been stabbed.”
