The New York Police Department (NYPD) have announced they have arrested and charged Rigoberto Lopez with the two murders that took place in the New York subway system. According to police reports Rigoberto Lopez was arrested at a homeless shelter where he was still armed with a knife. It is unknown at this time whether that knife was the one used during the four stabbings that left two people dead.
Who Is Rigoberto Lopez
Not a lot is known so far about Rigoberto Lopez as this is a breaking story. What is known is that Rigoberto Lopez is homeless and was living at a Brooklyn homeless shelter.
A variety of news sources online are reporting that Rigoberto Lopez who suffers from mental illness has confessed to the four stabbings that left two people dead.
According to police sources Rigoberto Lopez has been arrested before and has been convicted of assault and criminal contempt against his father. Apparently after Rigoberto Lopez asked his father for drug money he would be refused and Rigoberto would strike his father with a wooden stick. The father would get an order of protection against his son
Rigoberto Lopez would be arrested again the next month when he struck a police officer who was investigating a call that Rigoberto was harassing someone else who had an order of protection against him.
Rigoberto Lopez was last arrested in November when police stopped him after seeing him walking around with a large knife. After searching him they would find 48 bags of cocaine on him.
Rigoberto Lopez Subway Stabbings
Remember all of this is alleged as though Rigoberto Lopez has been arrested and reportedly confessed he has not been convicted on the charges
On Friday February 12, 2021 a sixty seven year old homeless man was sitting on his walker by the 181st St. stop was stabbed in the right knee and buttocks before Rigoberto Lopez fled
NYPD would find the body of a man on a subway train near the Far Rockaway-Mott Ave. station. The man was stabbed multiple times in the neck and chest
Two hours later a woman was stabbed multiple times near the Inwood/207th St. stop. She was transported to the hospital where she would die from her injuries.
The last person was stabbed multiple times in the back and neck while he slept at the 181st St./Fort Washington Ave. station just after midnight. The victim was able to find a security guard who immediately called for help.
All four stabbing took place along the A line of the New York Subway System
Rigoberto Lopez Videos
Rigoberto Lopez More News
A man arrested following a series of violent subway stabbings is being held without bail amid growing calls for action to stop a rising tide of violence on New York City’s subway system.
Rigoberto Lopez was ordered held without bail at his arraignment Monday morning in connection with four violent subway attacks.
Prosecutors say the 21-year-old man admitted to all four attacks and has a history of drug and assault arrests.
Lopez was taken into custody late Saturday and charged with murder and attempted murder in connection with the stabbing deaths of two homeless people on an A train and a knife attack on two others at the 181st station in Washington Heights, where he was apprehended.
Detectives were able to track Lopez down using video surveillance.
He was found with bloody clothes and a knife which, according to investigators, Lopez himself identified as the murder weapon.
The NYPD has now assigned an extra 500 additional officers to the city’s subway system after a string of attacks in recent months has led to calls for increased police presence.
Mayor Bill de Blasio rode the downtown 5 train Monday night to assure riders the subways are safe. Of course, he was surrounded by police.
“I want people to know, we’re going to do whatever the hell it takes to keep subways safe,” de Blasio said.
However, transit officials say 1,000 more cops are needed.
According to the MTA, ridership is down 70 percent on subways and 50 percent on buses
At one time Jared Fogle was a runaway hit for Subway as this formerly obese man was able to lose a ton of weight eating just their food however it turns out that Jared Fogle had a dark side that would eventually catch up with him and put him behind bars.
Jared Fogle Crimes
According to sources the FBI was first looking at Jared Fogle in 2007 after he made a number of comments about under aged girls during his speaking tour at a middle school event. Jared Fogle was caught on a tape recorder making the before mentioned comments and asking the woman to place web cameras in her children’s bedrooms. The FBI said they did investigate Jared Fogle but did not have enough substantial evidence to charge the Subway pitchman.
Jared Fogle world would collapse in 2015 when the FBI were investigating Russell Taylor, who was the director of the Jared Foundation (an organization that was suppose to help fight against childhood obesity but in actuality was all talk and no action, who was under investigation for child pornography. The FBI would soon figure out one of the people that Russell Taylor was trading pornography with was none other than Jared Fogle. The FBI and police in Indiana would serve a warrant on Fogle’s residence where all of his electronics were seized.
The FBI would then focus on a series of text messages from Fogle’s cellphone where he talked about abusing young girls and was trying to convince the woman to set him up with her sixteen year old cousin for sex.
Needless to say when Jared Fogle realized the amount of evidence against him he quickly began making a deal in order to avoid decades in prison. Jared Fogle would plead guilty to: two counts, one of distribution and receipt of child pornography and one of traveling to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor. Jared Fogle also agreed to pay each victim $100,000 and will remain on the sex offender list for life. Jared Fogle would be sentenced to fifteen years and eight months in prison.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt sentenced former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle to a prison term of more than 15 years Thursday, accepting a plea deal that sees him admit to charges of receiving child pornography and repeatedly having sex with minors.
The case involved interstate travel to pay minors for sex, as well as at least 400 child pornography videos — many of which Fogle received from the head of his charity, prosecutors said at today’s hearing.
Fogle was sentenced to 188 months on each count, to be served concurrently. That amounts to just over 15 and a half years.
“Will serve a minimum of 13 before parole. Lifetime supervised release,” reports RTV6’s Jordan Fischer.
The sentencing hearing started at 9 a.m. ET and lasted more than four hours. We’ve updated this post with news from the courthouse, relying on local news reporters. The proceeding was not televised.
Prosecutors had been seeking a punishment of around 12 years in prison, while Fogle’s lawyers asked for a sentence of around five years. Fogle is also reportedly paying about $1.4 million in total restitution to 14 victims, some of whom live in his home state of Indiana.
Update at 1:19 p.m. ET: Judge Announces Sentence
After going over a summary of the case, Judge Pratt issued a 188-month prison sentence for Fogle, to be served concurrently. Pratt said Fogle was “obsessed” with pornography and having sex with minors, according to WISH-TV’s Tim McNicholas.
Update at 12:42 p.m. ET: Judge Issues A Rebuke
Responding to Fogle’s statement that his actions have devastated his wife, Judge Pratt interrupted him to say, “You gave your wife almost $7 million though. She’ll be OK.”
In a brief statement to the court, Fogle says, “I owe a huge apology to the people who supported me and my positive messages the last 15 years,” according to WISH-TV’s Tim McNicholas.
Fogle then adds that he will learn from his recent experience and won’t commit these crimes again.
Update at 12:34 p.m. ET: Fogle Speaks
McNicholas, who’s at the courthouse, tweets: “Fogle breaks down in tears talking about victims. ‘Not a day will go by where I don’t think about them and what I did to impact their lives.’ “
Update at 11:48 a.m. ET: Prosecutors Read Texts Aloud
In a sequence that WISH-TV reporter Nick Natario describes as “disturbing and very graphic,” prosecutors in their portion of today’s hearing are reading aloud text conversations between Fogle and a prostitute who was also a minor.
RTV6’s Jordan Fischer says that’s “surreal” to sit in the courtroom and hear a prosecutor and Investigator Darin Odier of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department narrate texts between Fogle and others, in which emojis and text shorthand such as “LOL” appear in discussions of having sex with minors.
Update at 11:30 a.m. ET: Therapist Has A Treatment Plan
Defense witness Dr. Rick May, a psychologist who works with registered sex offenders in Colorado, testifies that Fogle showed remorse and shame in discussing his relations with children, according to Natario. The psychologist also says he developed a treatment plan for Fogle after spending hours with him.
Fogle’s defense team wants their client to serve his prison term in Colorado and continue to work with May, Natario reports.
Our original post continues:
At today’s hearing, Fogle’s defense presented two medical experts, including Canadian forensic psychiatrist Dr. John Bradford, who testified by phone that his tests of Fogle found evidence of hypersexuality.
Bradford also said that Fogle has a compulsive drive — and that “When he lost weight it seemed that in a short period of time he developed compulsive sexuality,” as Adriana Diaz of CBS News reports.
Fogle’s lawyer also sought to clarify that while his client had had sex with minors, his victims were adolescents and not children, The Indianapolis Star says. The prosecutor in the case also noted that investigators determined that Fogle had not abused his own children. Fogle has been married for five years and is the father of two children under the age of 10.
At today’s hearing, Pratt noted that as early as 2007, Fogle repeatedly discussed his interest in having sex with minors, RTV6’s Fischer reports. Citing audio recordings of Fogle, she said he also offered to pay prostitutes to find teenagers willing to have sex with him.
Fogle acknowledged that those details are accurate.
As the Star reports, Pratt “is widely considered the toughest judge in the Southern District in terms of prison sentences.”
The plea deal was reached in mid-August, after Fogle, 38, was charged with traveling to other states in order to pay to have sex with underage minors. It was a startling turn of events for the man who became a national celebrity by smilingly telling his story of how eating Subway sandwiches had helped him lose weight.
The seriousness of the case became apparent almost immediately, as reports of a wide-ranging investigation into Fogle were followed by a raid of his home — and details of his activities were publicly revealed by a female confidante who had worked with the FBI to gather evidence against him.
Soon after the raid of Fogle’s home, Subway announced it had severed all ties with him. That outcome, and the prison sentence pronounced today, all began with a single message to the police about Fogle.
“This entire investigation started with one lone tip to a state police officer,” Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter said in August.
As the U.S. attorney’s office in southern Indiana noted at the time Fogle was charged:
“His child pornography crime began when he learned that alleged co-conspirator Russell Taylor was sexually exploiting a 14 year old girl in March 2011. At that time, Mr. Fogle did nothing to stop the abuse or report it to authorities, but chose instead to receive and repeatedly view the child pornography involving the girl and those other minors produced by his alleged co-conspirator in the years that followed. It total, Mr. Fogle admitted in court pleadings filed today that his actions caused the sexual victimization of a total of 12 minors in Indiana before his co-conspirator’s arrest in April 2015. He preyed on minor victims who did not have the ability to protect themselves.”
As the Two-Way reported in August, at the time of those events, Taylor was running Fogle’s charitable foundation. He has reached his own plea deal and is expected to be sentenced in December.
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