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7-Year-Old Girl Randomly Stabbed by Stranger While Waiting for Mother on Busy Street

Cat Leigh
True Crime by Cat Leigh
5 min readDec 24, 2024

The man who stabbed Wendy Wolin in the abdomen quickly fled the scene as bystanders helped the distressed child.

Photo by Umut Tülüoğlu on Unsplash

On the afternoon of March 8, 1966, seven-year-old Wendy Sue Wolin and her mother, Shirley Fleischner, left their Pierce Manor apartment building in the Westminster neighborhood of Elizabeth, New Jersey. They planned to pick up Wendy’s older sister Jodi from Hebrew school and go shopping.

While Shirley got the car from the parking lot behind the building, Wendy waited alone on the busy corner of Irvington Avenue and Prince Street.

Several people watched as a white burly middle-aged man approached the girl and inexplicably hit her in the abdomen. A woman walking down the street with her niece recalled,

“He asked me ‘How do you get downtown?’ Then he walked past me, and I turned around and I looked for my niece. And I saw him bent over this little girl. I said to the little girl ‘What is the matter?’ She said ‘He punched me, the man punched me.’”

The man quickly walked away as bystanders took Wendy to the fire station across the street. It was then that someone opened her coat and realized she had actually been stabbed.

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