Thomas has pleaded not guilty to five counts of state charges of attempted murder. Thomas’s car - a different vehicle from the Honda Pilot - when he was arrested in Harlem, about 30 miles from Monsey, with blood on his clothes, officials said. Sussman, his lawyer, said.Īccording to a federal criminal complaint, officers found both a bloody machete and a bloody knife in Mr. Thomas, who is said to be 37 or 38, was in custody in the Rockland County jail, Mr. It was in the authorities’ hands as of Thursday, and they were examining it for any evidence that might connect it to the November attack.

The police have since obtained a federal search warrant for the Honda Pilot, Chief Weidel said. When detectives examined the car, they found nothing to suggest that it had been on Howard Drive or that it had been involved in the attack, Chief Weidel said. He told them that he had been in Clarkstown, about 30 miles from his home, because the car had “mechanical problems.” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday that when she spoke with the police, she was not aware they were investigating the attack.

Thomas “likes to go driving around at night” and that it was not unusual for him to be driving around at 3 a.m., Chief Weidel said. Thomas’s mother, Kim Kennedy, who told officers that her son had driven the car that night, he added. The video was not high-quality, Chief Weidel said, so detectives showed the footage to area auto-body shops, where workers said they believed the car was a Honda Pilot.Ī detective then discovered that a Honda Pilot had been in nearby Clarkstown about two and a half hours before the stabbing, he said. The police investigating the November attack had obtained surveillance video that showed the vehicle that might have been involved. Since then, tension and anxiety among the area’s Orthodox community has only increased after a string of anti-Semitic attacks in the region, including a mass shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, N.J., that killed two Hasidic Jews, among others, as well as a number of anti-Semitic crimes in Brooklyn and the stabbing in Monsey. Thomas, of Greenwood Lake, N.Y., was arrested on Saturday and charged in the bloody rampage that horrified people across the country, a detective recognized his name from the earlier investigation and decided to re-examine the possibility that he had been involved. Thomas to a vehicle similar to the one they believed might have been used, did not have evidence to directly connect him to the attack.Īfter Mr. Within days of the chilling stabbing in November, when an Orthodox Jewish man was attacked as he walked to his synagogue, officers interviewed Mr.

Both attacks occurred in Monsey, N.Y., about 30 miles northwest of New York City. Thomas, was not yet a suspect in the one in November. The police are actively exploring whether a man accused of storming into a Hasidic rabbi’s home and stabbing five people at a Hanukkah celebration last week in a New York City suburb was also involved in another stabbing near a synagogue a month earlier, officials said on Thursday.Ĭhief Brad Weidel of the Ramapo Police Department, which is overseeing both investigations, said that detectives were looking at possible links between the two attacks but that the man, Grafton E.

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