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Arkmayer Davis was stabbed the morning of Christmas Eve on his way back from a laundromat to the shelter where he and his husband had been staying since a fire displaced them December 2.
A Black gay man who’d been left homeless by a fire was fatally stabbed in New York City’s Bronx borough the morning of Christmas Eve and bled out in his husband’s arms.
Arkmayer Davis, 36, was stabbed on the street on the way back from a laundromat to the shelter where he and his husband, Daris Antwan Davis, 35, had been living since a fire at their apartment building destroyed almost all of their belongings December 2, the New York Daily Newsreports.
Arkmayer Davis had gone to the laundromat Tuesday morning to exchange cell phones with his husband, who had mistakenly taken Arkmayer’s with him. When Daris Antwan Davis returned to their room at the shelter, he found Arkmayer unconscious and covered in blood.
“I came up to him, I shook him. I tried to wake him up and I see that he wasn’t moving,” Daris told the Daily News. “I looked at his stomach. He wasn’t breathing and I could tell you he had no pulse and he was bleeding out.”
Arkmayer “had been stabbed repeatedly in the arm, leg and torso,” the paper reports. He was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital but couldn’t be revived. Police have not made an arrest and have not stated a motive for the crime.
Daris and Arkmayer met in North Carolina in 2008, when Arkmayer, a New Yorker, was visiting his father there. “When I met him I fell in love with him,” Daris told the Daily News. “I’ve been through so much, but that’s the only person I ever wanted to be with in my life.”
The couple lived in North Carolina for a time but moved to New York City last year to be closer to Arkmayer’s mother, who had suffered domestic abuse.
“He gave up everything for me,” said his mother, Gertrude Davis, 51. “He rescued me. He helped me. He came every day. ‘Put your head up, Ma. You’re a strong woman, Ma.’ He got me through what I was going through.” He was “a very beautiful young man,” she added.
Daris and Arkmayer had planned to go see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree on Christmas Day. “Even though we was in the shelter and we lost everything we was talking about … going down to see the Rockefeller tree, going to his mom’s house, eating,” Daris told the Daily News. “Christmas ain’t never gonna be the same no more.”
