A man was found bleeding from stab wounds inside a Northeast Philadelphia pizza shop after an attack that family members say began in a nearby parking lot over the weekend.
Philadelphia police officers were initially called to a parking lot along the 900 block of Orthodox Street in the Crescentville neighborhood just before 1 p.m. Saturday for a report of a person with a gun, police said Monday.
The officers then found a 27-year-old man who had appeared to be stabbed multiple times lying on the floor of a nearby Pizza Hut store off Castor Avenue, investigators said.
Medics rushed the injured man to a hospital where he died a few hours later, police said. He was identified as Wilber Caceres-Martinez from the Somerton section of Northeast Philadelphia.
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Caceres-Martinez's family told Telemundo 62 that the attack began in the adjacent parking lot and that he wound up collapsing inside the pizza shop.
Police said they recovered a weapon and made an arrest. On Tuesday, they announced charges against 26-year-old Tommy Duran. Duran was charged with murder, theft and other counts and jailed without bail.
"I want justice," Caceres-Martinez's mother Jacqueline Martínez said in Spanish. "I want them to leave him in jail as much as they can so he cannot hurt another innocent family."
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Duran's court-appointed attorney Paul DiMaio told NBC10 he had yet to speak to his client about the case.
Entering Tuesday, at least 29 homicides were recorded in Philadelphia in 2023, according to police data. That's down 33% from the same time last year, which ended as one of the deadliest years on record in Philadelphia.
Correction (Jan. 31, 2023, 11:57 a.m.): This story has been updated to reflect that the stabbing took place outside of the pizza shop.
