A community vigil marked the tragic death of the Columbia University student, while his alleged killer, a gang member on parole, sat in custody 12 blocks from downtown awaiting murder charges.
Hundreds of mourners from the university community attended a candlelight vigil on Friday night in Butler Lawn to remember PhD student, Davide Giri, a talented young academic with a promising future.
“He was young and was deprived of his life and taken away by an unfathomable act of inhumanity,” Columbia University President Lee Bollinger told the crowd, calling Giri “a brilliant PhD student in an exciting field in his life. I’m on my way to an incredible career. “
Giri, a candidate for a doctorate in computer science, was walking home from soccer practice around 11:00 p.m. Thursday in the Morningside Park area of upper Manhattan when he was fatally stabbed in the rib cage with a kitchen knife, authorities said.
According to Columbia, Giri worked on system-level design architectures and methodologies for heterogeneous systems in chip, with a particular focus on accelerators hardware. He won Columbia’s Andrew P. Kosoresow Memorial Award for excellence in teaching and service in 2018, the university said.
Giri earned her Master of Philosophy in Computer Science from Columbia in 2020 and her MSc, the standard master’s qualification for courses taught in science and technology subjects, in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2015. Also He earned degrees in Shanghai and Italy and is the co-author of several publications, according to his Columbia University biography.
New York City Police officers, investigating Giri’s stabbing, came across a second victim, a 27-year-old tourist who was stabbed in the stomach near West 110th Street and Cathedral Parkway. That tourist was able to give authorities a description of the suspect, and the suspect was detained inside Central Park while threatening another potential victim, a 29-year-old man, with a large kitchen knife, police said.
The 29-year-old was not injured and the tourist is expected to recover.
Law enforcement officials on Friday afternoon were able to link the suspect, identified as Vincent Pinkney, to a third stabbing some 24 hours before Giri’s attack.
That initial attack was reported around 12:30 a.m. Thursday, again with a knife and close to Cathedral Parkway and Manhattan Avenuepolice sources said. A witness said the suspect stabbed his friend in the neck and ran off. The friend was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, sources said.
Police walked the 25-year-old suspect from Barracks 26 Friday night following charges of murder, battery and criminal possession of a weapon. He refused to answer questions while they escorted him to a police vehicle.
Our sister chain News 4 learned that Pinkney has had five previous arrests, including charges of conspiracy, assault with the intent to cause physical injury and gang assault. He is currently on probation in connection with a gang robbery and has no history of emotional disturbances, law enforcement sources say.
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