October 14, 2022
An Iranian-American man has been charged with three counts of attempted murder after he entered a Los Angeles area hospital and stabbed a doctor and three nurses in a bloody frenzy.
Unlike a similar assault a few days earlier in Oklahoma, there was no indication that the assailant had any connection to or had ever been treated by the doctor and nurses.
Ashkan Amirsoleymani, 35, invaded the emergency ward at Encino Hospital Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley June 3 and, after the stabbings, remained inside a room for hours before police arrested him.
The motive for his attack has not yet been disclosed.
Ironically, the first people who saw what was happening and came to help the doctor and nurses who were bleeding were a pair of Iranian-Americans who worked in a nearby dental office, Parham Saadat and Faraz Farahnik.
Amirsoleymani had parked his car in the middle of a street and went to the emergency room, where he asked for treatment for anxiety before stabbing the doctor and nurses, authorities said.
Fire officials said the three victims were taken to a trauma center. Police later said one underwent surgery.
There was no evidence that Amirsoleymani knew the victims, Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Alan Hamilton told a news conference.
The assailant remained inside a room in the hospital for about four hours as SWAT team members tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with him before he was finally arrested, police said.
Amirsoleymani was later taken to another hospital for treatment of self-inflicted injuries to his arms, authorities said.
Hamilton said the man had a lengthy criminal record, including two arrests last year for battery of a police officer and resisting arrest. In all, he has five previous convictions, including one for assault with a deadly weapon, dating back to 2008.
Saadat, a dental hygienist who works nearby, told the Los Angeles Times that he and his coworker, ran across the street to help the victims.
“There was blood all over the floor, blood in the rooms, blood on the gurney the doctor was laying on,” Saadat told the newspaper. “It was a bloodbath.”
Saadat said he later closed a storage room’s door behind the suspect to keep him contained inside and only became afraid when they made eye contact.
“He just very calmly turned his face and looked at me through the window, then turned his head back around. No reaction,” he said. “That’s where it kind of got me.”
Benjamin Roman, an ultrasound technician, told KNBC-TV that before the stabbing, he saw the suspect, who had a dog with him and who might have been high on drugs because he looked anxious and was drenched in sweat.
The attack came only two days after a gunman killed four people and then himself at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The assailant got inside a building on the Saint Francis Hospital campus with little trouble, just hours after buying an AR-style rifle, authorities said. The man killed his surgeon and three other people at a medical office. He blamed the doctor for his continuing pain after a recent back operation.