The heartbroken girlfriend who watched her activist beau get stabbed to death in Brooklyn two years ago recalled that he was about to propose when he was killed — as his murderer was hit with a 20 years-to-life sentence Wednesday.
An emotional Claudia Morales told a packed courtroom that she and Ryan Carson were “on the precipice of our life together” when he was randomly butchered by Brian Dowling in October 2023, just as the pair were returning home from a wedding.
“We were at the precipice of our life together,” she said. “We were months away from moving in together, already arguing about hand towels.
“We attended a wedding hours before he died, having the privilege of witnessing two of my dearest friends in the world enter a life together, and we exchanged glances thinking silently the same thing — ‘That will be us one day, soon.’”
She said at Carson’s wake, pals told her that he had discussed proposing.
Morales remembered her slain love as “an activist, organizer, a self-described and self-proven revolutionary” dedicated to a slew of issues, including “overdose prevention and harm reduction, climate justice, bail reform, abortion and reproductive rights, police reform, prison reform — and ultimately, though he knew it was far away, abolition.”
“I lack today any thirst for vengeance or retribution,” she said. “I have no sense of closure or conclusion today.”
Carson and Morales were walking on Malcolm X Boulevard around 4 a.m. on Oct. 2, 2023, when Dowling confronted the couple in an unprovoked attack that quickly turned deadly.
“What the f–k are you looking at?” he sneered at Carson. “I’ll kill you!”
Surveillance video footage of the attack shows Dowling pulling out a knife and stabbing Carson, who tries to run for his life but trips over a bus stop bench in front of a horrified Morales.
Dowling is then seen stabbing Carson repeatedly as he lay helpless on the ground, leaving him to bleed to death on the sidewalk as he berated Morales before skulking away.
Dowling surrendered to cops several days later and was charged with murder.
He pleaded guilty Jan. 22 as part of a deal from prosecutors in exchange for a 20-years-to-life sentence, which was handed down on Wednesday by Acting Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun.
“What the defendant did was clearly and absolutely unforgivable, inexcusable and it was the most heinous, most terrible thing that he did,” Chun said in court. “He took a life that he should not have.
“He was not involved with gangs, he was not involved with drugs. He obviously had an issue with anger that led to him to using that knife on the deceased,” the judge added.
Dowling remained silent, as a portrait of Carson stood on an easel near the jury box for the proceedings.
In another moving courtroom moment, Carson’s mother Marybeth Thoresen remembered her only child as “kind, caring, endlessly energetic” and “a talented poet.
“Ryan has been dead for over a year but I still catch myself saying, ‘Oh I need to check in with Ryan about this or get his perspective on that,’” she told the courtroom. “I grieve because Ryan will never marry or have a baby, Kenny and I will never see him again and we will never be grandparents — this is the end of the line for us. Mr Dowling’s actions have extinguished goodness in the world.
“This has been agonizing and has created a spiderweb of outrage and grief for us all.”
The slain man’s father, military veteran Kenneth Carson, said his son’s murder has brought back the trauma of PTSD he battled for years after returning from tours in Afghanistan.
“When I was at my lowest dealing with my PTSD, the idea of leaving Ryan behind and leaving this world is what saved me from the abyss, which I found myself in,” he said. “That lifeline has been shattered.
“Brian Dowling said to my son Ryan Carson ‘Who are you looking at?’ and ‘I’m going to kill you,’” Kenneth Carson added. “Hopefully that personification of evil will stay where it belongs, behind bars.”
