“I’m absolutely positive that he would immediately see that this was a person who was suffering from a lack of resources in our community.”
Friends of Ryan Carson, who was stabbed to death early Monday morning at a Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn bus stop, say Carson would have sympathy for the man who fatally attacked him, and that he would want his killing to be used to further left-wing policies in the city.
"I know he would have wanted people to use his death as a means to talk about structural wrongs in the city," Melissa Lozada-Olivia, a writer who met Carson through mutual friends, told The Gothamist.
New York State Assemblymember Emily Gallagher told the outlet, "I'm absolutely positive that he would immediately see that this was a person who was suffering from a lack of resources in our community, who probably needs better mental health support, possibly housing, possibly drug support, drug treatment."
"What he would want to avenge his death is for us to fix how broken this city is," she added.
Senator Chuck Schumer posted on X, "Ryan Carson threw himself into everything he did with passion and humanity.
"I worked with him on a big townhall he hosted with NYPIRG and on the Inflation Reduction Act. A rising talent and an extraordinary activist. May his memory and work inspire us."
Carson was the senior solid waste campaign director at the nonprofit New York Public Interest Research Group, and also advocated for safe injection sites across the state.
"I’m passionate about safe injection facilities because I’ve seen family members become addicted to opioids prescribed for pain caused by their occupations,” Carson said in 2021. "I’ve lost friends and family to the opioid epidemic, including my best friend, who died of a heroin overdose in 2016."
The stabbing took place around 4 am on Monday as Carson and his girlfriend, Claudia Morales, were waiting for a bus in the Brooklyn neighborhood. The 18-year-old man suspected of being involved, who was identified by police on Tuesday afternoon, has not been arrested.
Carson was a Black Lives Matter activist, using acronyms like "ACAB" in some posts, according to the Daily Mail.
In an October 2020 interview regarding his poetry, Carson said he was "exposed to my first real activist struggle through the Occupy Wall St. movement."
Carson spoke on making "socialist poetry," and said in regards to police, "I’m f*cking 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."
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