Homeless man stabbed trying to save woman left to die in the street

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Homeless man stabbed trying to save woman left to die in the street
By The New York Times
Posted: 04/26/2010

NEW YORK — It will probably never be clear how many people realized that Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was dying.

One man bent down to the sidewalk to shake the man, lifting him to reveal a pool of blood before walking away. Two men appeared to have a conversation about the situation, one taking a photo of the body before departing. But the rest merely turned their heads toward the body, revealing some curiosity as they hurried along.

What is clear from a surveillance tape is that Tale-Yax, a homeless Guatemalan immigrant, lay on a Queens street for more than an hour before anyone called police. By the time help arrived, he was dead.

Tale-Yax, who friends said occasionally worked as a day laborer and often slept in public parks, had been stabbed while apparently coming to the assistance of a woman being confronted by another man.

On Sunday, a week after the killing, people in the area seemed mostly unshaken by its circumstances. Many were unaware that someone had died on the street in a hardscrabble neighborhood with large populations of Central American immigrants and of homeless men.

But to the question of obligation — whether those who encountered the body should have stopped and helped the man — the answers came quickly.

Perhaps the passers-by thought he was drunk. Perhaps they were illegal immigrants themselves, too nervous to contact the authorities. Or perhaps they had just learned a lesson that Tale-Yax so clearly had not: better to keep to oneself than to risk the trouble that comes from extending a helping hand.

"It's bad," said Alexis Perez, 29, the superintendent of two buildings on the block where the stabbing occurred. "But I live here, so I know what it's like. There are a lot of alcoholics who drink, and then they fall down and they're laying on the ground. People say to themselves, 'I don't know them, so I won't get involved.' "

Regardless of the explanation, the death has become another unfortunate case study in bystander behavior in emergencies, a psychological field that developed after the 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in Queens, where neighbors heard her screams but did not call police.

The death of Tale-Yax is all the more dramatic because police say he was stabbed as a result of his apparently trying to help a stranger.

"I'm afraid what we've got here is a situation of people failing to help, and the failure appears to be a moral failure," said John Darley, a professor of psychology at Princeton University. "He did what you're supposed to do, and we let the person, who did what he was supposed to do, die."

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