Three men were stabbed in Crown Heights, Brooklyn early Monday morning — hours before the notoriously violent West Indian American Day parade was set to kick off, according to police.
A 32-year-old man and 23-year-old man were stabbed in the neck and a 36-year-old was stabbed in the face near Carroll Street and Utica Avenue around 5:48 a.m., cops said.
EMS responded and rushed all three to Kings County Hospital, where the 32-year-old man remains in critical condition.
The 23-year-old man and 36-year-old man were listed in stable condition, according to police.
No arrests have been made, cops said.
The stabbing happened just blocks from the pre-dawn J’Ouvert Festival, which begins at 6 a.m. and runs until the parade kicks off at 11 a.m.
Police said the parade will be promptly shut down at 5:30 p.m. — a decision made after six people were shot during last year’s festivities, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
“Thousands of NYPD cops will be on the parade routes and in the surrounding neighborhoods from Sunday night through Monday. This is one of our department’s largest deployments of the year at this time,” she said Friday.
The annual festivities, which celebrate Caribbean culture, have been marred by violence over the years.
In 2015, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo aide Carey Gabay was fatally shot in the head during the 2015 festivities after getting caught in gang crossfire.
The following year, two people — a 22-year-old St. John’s University student and a 17-year-old were fatally shot in the chest.
In another horrific incident in 2011, Brooklyn mom Denise Gay, 56, was killed while shielding her family from gunfire as she sat on the stoop of her Crown Heights home.
