Christmas shopper was stabbed to death by mentally ill homeless man in Barnes & Noble: cops
A 65-year-old woman was stabbed to death by a mentally ill homeless man as she shopped for Christmas gifts in a Florida Barnes & Noble, according to officials.
Rita Loncharich was reading a magazine at the bookstore in Palm Beach Gardens when she was stabbed in the back without warning by Antonio Moore, 40, who came to Florida just days earlier, according to an affidavit that said he confessed.
Loncharich managed to call her husband, Stuart, and tell him she’d been stabbed, he told CBS 12.
Responding officers found her just before 8 p.m. “with a knife embedded in her back inside the store,” the affidavit said. She was pronounced dead in a hospital just before 9:30 p.m.
The store’s surveillance cameras caught Moore running off to nearby woods, where he was quickly arrested, police said.
Moore “willfully admitted to stabbing a woman in the back inside Barnes and Noble and running out of the store,” the affidavit said — saying he had “no prior interaction” with or motive to kill her.
He instead blamed a psychotic “internal build up” that made him pick on “the closest person in the store,” investigators said in the affidavit.
The homeless suspect, who arrived by bus from Georgia just a week earlier, was charged with premeditated first-degree murder, records show. He is being held without bond and is due in court on Wednesday.
Police told the victim’s husband that the suspect has a history of mental illness and had been living in the woods, he told CBS 12.
The brutal, random attack left other Barnes & Noble customers terrified.
“It’s terrible that anybody can’t walk into a regular store without being fearful of being stabbed,” a customer who only gave the first name David told CBS 12.
“For violence to occur somewhere like that, for someone to lose their life there, it’s shocking,” said another Barnes & Noble customer, who gave her name only as Rebekkah.
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