The 32-year-old Brooklyn man fatally stabbed by an unhinged suspect in a “horrific, brutal murder” Monday was remembered by friends as a big-hearted activist and talented poet — who once talked a mugger down from trying to rob him.
Ryan Carson of Bedford-Stuyvesant was stabbed multiple times in the chest by a stranger just before 4 a.m. as he waited with his gal pal at the B38 bus stop at Lafayette Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard – after the pair left a wedding, cops and sources said.
“It’s a horrific, brutal murder of someone who worked piously to help make this city a better place,” said Tom Krantz, 31, Carson’s roommate who knew him since 2012, to The Post Monday.
The suspect – who had not been caught by Monday afternoon – was acting erratically and knocking over scooters before he seethed, “What are you looking at?” and senselessly attacked Carson, sources said.
Carson’s girlfriend held her mortally wounded beau in her arms before he was rushed to Kings County Hospital Center, where he could not be saved, according to cops and sources.
Carson – who came to the Big Apple from the Boston area in 2010 to attend Pratt Institute – was an activist focused on sustainability and environmental policies, Krantz said.
Krantz said it was remarkable “how much he actually did for the entire city and for his friends.
“He’s really… like the epicenter of an entire community that he created, that he brought together.
“I don’t think anyone is exaggerating when they say he would give the shirt off his back,” the roommate said. “He was the guy that bent over backward time and time again to be there with his friends.”
Carson, who always had a “heart” for organizing people around a cause, was likely inspired into activism by his parents, Krantz said.
“His mom is a tugboat captain, so she always volunteered in the community and was very active in organizing in her own community,” Krantz said.
Carson was also known for his “gregarious” nature and was often the “loudest and smartest guy in the room,” Krantz recalled.
He once walked 500 miles across New York “to raise awareness to pass legislation for the institution of the first overdose prevention facility in the state,” friend and former classmate Alex Harristhal, 29, said.
Carson was also a published poet – who once penned a poem called “Anxiety” about fears over his own death – namely about the “inconvenience” his passing would cause others.
“That it could come while someone waits for me, that I couldn’t call to let them know I was held up,” he wrote in the poem.
Acadia Cutschall, 32 — who attended school with Carson, volunteered with him and called him her “best friend” — went to his stoop to mourn his death.
“I was present once when he literally talked a guy out of mugging him,” Cutschall said. “He gave him some money.”
If Carson had the opportunity, he may have even lent a hand to the man who took his life, according to Cutschall.
“He would probably help out a guy like that,” she said.
He cared so deeply for others that if he were able to speak about his own death, he would take himself out of the equation, Krantz said.
“It wouldn’t be about him,” Krantz said. “It would be about trying to solve what’s going on.”
Additional reporting by Larry Celona
