(Headline USA) An unhinged leftist suspected of stabbing two workers at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and making threats against former President Donald Trump was arrested at a Philadelphia bus terminal early Tuesday after setting his hotel room on fire, police said.
Gary Cabana, 60, had been sought by police since Saturday. Philadelphia police found him sleeping on a bench and he was arrested without incident. He was charged with arson and other offenses for the hotel fire.
Officers in Philadelphia went looking for Cabana after responding to a small fire at 6 p.m. Monday at a Best Western hotel. Sprinklers extinguished the blaze, which a fire marshal determined had been deliberately set.
New York City police said they would seek to have him extradited, but did not provide a specific time frame for when that might happen.
Speaking Tuesday at a news conference, New York City Police Department Chief of Detectives James Essig said that in addition to assault charges related to the museum stabbings, Cabana is charged with a prior unrelated assault and aggravated harassment for sending threats by email.
New York City police said Cabana leaped over a reception desk and stabbed two employees inside the Museum of Modern Art after he was denied entrance because his membership had been revoked.
Cabana’s membership was revoked for two separate incidents of disorderly behavior at the museum in recent days, police said. A letter informing him of the action had been sent Friday, but he showed up at the museum Saturday to see a film.
“He became upset about not being allowed entrance, and then jumped over the reception desk and proceeded to attack and stab two employees of the museum multiple times,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counterterrorism John Miller said at a news conference Saturday.
The workers, a man and woman, both age 24, were stabbed multiple times but suffered non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
Authorities have not released more details surrounding what police said were threats about Trump.
Cabana was a fugitive for several days, trading messages with reporters on social media while he was on the run. He claimed he was living with mental illness and that the museum had revoked his membership unfairly.
After going on the lam, he made posts claiming to be in Florida and threatening to visit Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he intended to decapitate him.
Cabana is not the first left-winger to make the transition from Trump Derangement Syndrome to more violent expressions of mental illness.
In June 2017, only months after Trump’s inauguration, a rabid Bernie Sanders follower named James Hodgkinson targeted Republican members of Congress who were practicing for an annual baseball game, critically wounding Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La.
More recently, a former California sociology professor who had vocally disparaged the ex-president was indicted for starting four forest fires.
And a black-supremacist professor at UCLA was prevented from unleashing carnage after students flagged his alarming social-media posts, including a radical manifesto.
Among those arrested for stalking Trump at Mar-a-Lago was a Connecticut opera-singer who in January was found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 2020 breach of the property.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
