Detectives have arrested the man they say fatally stabbed a 30-year-old health and fitness lover during a nighttime brawl on a bustling Brooklyn commercial strip, police said Friday.
Tristan Matthews, 31, was arrested on Wednesday for the Sept. 15 slaying and charged with manslaughter, gang assault and weapon possession.
He’s accused of knifing Joshua Wahhab in the left torso on Nostrand Ave. near Fulton St. in Bedford-Stuyvesant about 12:30 a.m.
Wahhab, who had just recently started two jobs, was about a mile from his home when he was killed during an argument outside a deli with four or five men, cops and relatives said.
EMS rushed him to Kings County Hospital but doctors were unable to save him.
The fatal fight left the sidewalk covered in blood.
“Man, I seen all that blood earlier and I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it,” one nearby resident who declined to give his name, told the Daily News at the time. “I pass by here all the time. It’s a busy area, but a stabbing and seeing all that blood I haven’t seen that before. It’s wicked.”
Nicholas Williams / New York Daily News
The fatal fight left the sidewalk covered in blood. (Nicholas Williams for New York Daily News)
Matthews lives three blocks from where the fatal stabbing took place. He was ordered held without bail during a brief arraignment proceeding on Thursday. What sparked the fatal fight wasn’t immediately disclosed. Nor was it clear how cops identified Matthews as a suspect.
Wahhab, 30, had started working at both a gym and a Whole Foods Market just a week before his slaying, embracing a lifestyle focused on health and fitness, his heartbroken relatives said.
“He worked hard all week and just wanted to relax and enjoy his evening,” his sister Aziza Wahhab, 45, told The News about the night he was slain. “He was into fitness since high school, big on staying fit and healthy.”
Before heading out Sunday from the home he shared with his mother, Joshua had cooked and eaten. He told his mom he’d be back soon, his sister said.
“He didn’t say exactly where he was going but he promised to return,” she said.
Aziza said her brother would have been willing to help his killer.
“If [the stabber] wanted food, my brother would feed him,” she said. “If he needed help, my brother would help however he could. Violence was never his goal.”
