Ryan Carson and his girlfriend were heading home from a wedding around 4 a.m. Monday when 18-year-old Brian Dowling walked past them while sitting at a bus stop in Brooklyn.
Carson and his girlfriend got up and walked down the sidewalk behind Dowling, who started kicking at mopeds and bikes. Instead of stopping immediately, they continued, and the altercation began.
Dowling said to Carson, “What are you looking at?”
NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said, “Mr. Carson begins to immediately try to de-escalate the situation.”
Carson told Dowling to “Chill, chill, chill,” and Dowling swung a knife. Dowling stabbed Carson three times, and one stab hit Carson’s heart.
On Thursday, the police arrested Dowling and charged him with murder with depraved indifference and criminal possession of a weapon.
Here's the full uncensored version of the Ryan Carson stabbing. He tripped over the bench leaving him disoriented and vulnerable on the ground. pic.twitter.com/VyWLfrbYgD
— Expose Them (@ExposeDarkDeeds) October 3, 2023
Carson was a far-left activist with socialist views, and in an interview from 2020, he said, “But the fact of the matter is, I’m fucking scared. I spent this summer, like many of the past years of my life, watching people I care about get attacked by the police in the streets.”
Lozada-Oliva was a friend of his who told the Gothamist, “I know he would have wanted people to use his death as a means to talk about structural wrongs in the city.” the Gothamist went on and said, “To say would have seen his killer as a victim of the kind of broken systems he was working to fix.”
Murdered Brooklyn antifa activist Ryan Carson, who is celebrated by leftists & Democrats for his "kindness," had locked his two accounts @RyantCarson & @ArtSchoolJock. But posts have emerged showing him celebrating death & violence. https://t.co/R5lBwKzu8L pic.twitter.com/jX7rLJsWNj
— Andy Ngô ?️? (@MrAndyNgo) October 5, 2023
According to a friend named Acadia Cutschall, this isn’t the first time someone has attacked him. “I was present once when he literally talked a guy out of mugging him,” Cutschall told a local newspaper. “He gave him some money.”
This was a tragic yet preventable death. Just because you successfully de-escalated a situation or someone else did doesn’t mean you can repeat the outcome. It is a false sense of security to believe that something that happened before will work again. Maintain a gap between yourself and anyone who might be a threat, and do whatever you can to stay out of harm’s way.
That reactionary gap is what you need so you have time to respond and stay alive.