A man who followed Raul Morales away from the second of the July stabbings on the Upper West Side says the two ended up in the same elevator, and that Morales had a few words for him on his way out.
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The man is George Zamot, a 49-year-old UPS worker from the Bronx who was honored Wednesday for his role in Morales’s arrest. Zamot told the New York Post in an exclusive interview that he was on his way to make a delivery on July 23 when Morales allegedly stabbed a 50-year-old Jewish man in the chest with a screwdriver near West 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The Post identifies that man as Moshe Grunhaus. Zamot said he saw Grunhaus holding his chest and asking someone to call 911 because the man in the black hoodie had just stabbed him, and that Grunhaus then looked to him to “do something.”That was the second attack of the afternoon. About 12 minutes earlier, Morales allegedly stabbed a 57-year-old Asian-American man in the back near West 84th Street and Central Park West, as we reported when two men were stabbed that day.
Zamot said he trailed Morales at a distance for two to three blocks and followed him into his building, which the Post describes as a NYCHA building. The two ended up in the elevator together. Another rider got off on the third floor, and when Morales got off on the 11th, Zamot said, he looked at him and said, “Have a great day.” Zamot said all he could do was stare at him in “total amazement.” He noted the apartment number and alerted the NYPD, and officers arrested Morales after a standoff that lasted nearly an hour.
Prosecutors’ account of that afternoon, laid out when Morales was arraigned on the indictment in Manhattan Supreme Court on Sept. 8, also described a witness following Morales to his building near West 89th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office didn’t name that witness. According to the DA’s office, Morales changed his clothes once inside and initially refused to come out before surrendering to police.
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Zamot said he’s kept quiet about what he did, telling the Post on Wednesday that his own mother “only found out today.” He spoke later that day at the UJA-Federation of New York’s Rally to Stop Anti-Semitism in Midtown, where he urged New Yorkers to “be the thing that hate crimes cannot operate around.” He said he’d been thinking about Grunhaus’s mother, who he later learned is alive and lives in Israel, and that he wasn’t going to let another mother lose her child. In a prerecorded message to Zamot, Grunhaus called him “my hero in brown uniform” and told him the city is safer and better because of him.Every count in the grand jury indictment carries a hate crime designation, covering both victims, and prosecutors have said text messages recovered from Morales’s phone contained antisemitic sentiments. The attacks were followed by a weekend rally nearby, and the grand jury voted the charges in on July 30. Morales pleaded not guilty to the original complaint. The charges are allegations, and Morales is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
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