On the night of August 2, 2010, Arnold Minor, forty-nine, was stabbed to death in Flint, Michigan. He was one of eighteen men attacked between May and August that year by a very tall man who drove around late at night in a green Chevrolet TrailBlazer, stopped beside men walking alone, asked for directions or help with his car, and then stabbed them, usually in the chest or stomach. The men he chose were small-framed, and most were African American. Five died: David Motley, thirty-one; Emmanuel Abdul Muhammad, fifty-nine; Darwin Marshall, forty-three; Frank Kellybrew, sixty; and Arnold Minor. Police in Leesburg, Virginia, where three Black men had been attacked with a hammer, suspected a racial motive; Genesee County prosecutors declined to name one, while noting that Flint's population is mostly Black. The press called the attacker the Flint Serial Slasher.
On August 4 Genesee County announced that the stabbings going back to May were the work of one man and set up a task force. On August 5 Elias Abuelazam was stopped for a traffic violation in Arlington, Virginia, taken in on a warrant for simple assault and released on personal bond. By August 9 Leesburg police had tied the three hammer attacks there to him through the victims' descriptions, surveillance footage and his vehicle, and the next day Toledo police said the stabbing of a Black man there matched as well. At ten on the night of August 11, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers arrested him at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as he prepared to board a Delta flight to Tel Aviv.
He was born in Israel on August 28 or 29, 1976, into a well-to-do Arab Christian family, and came to the United States as a child after his mother remarried. He held a green card but never became a citizen, and in 1995 changed his surname to Abullazam. Until 2008 he worked as a mental health technician at an adolescent psychiatric center in Leesburg. In Michigan he clerked at the Kingwater Market in Beecher from July 5 to August 1, 2010, where customers knew him as Eli, and lived in his uncle's house on Maryland Avenue on Flint's east side. He was six feet five and weighed 280 pounds. Early in 2010, on a visit to his family in Ramla, he was suspected of stabbing a friend in the face with a screwdriver; the friend would not press charges.
He waived extradition, was flown to Flint on August 26 and held in solitary confinement, and at his arraignment the judge refused bail even after the prosecutor asked for ten million dollars. The trial for Minor's murder opened on May 8, 2012. The judge allowed evidence of the other Genesee County attacks. The key evidence was a drop of Minor's blood on a pair of trousers in Abuelazam's luggage, and the prosecution called fifty witnesses, among them other victims and his own uncle, who had helped police catch him. The defense argued insanity through a psychiatrist who diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and said Abuelazam blamed evil spirits; the prosecution noted the doctor's specialty was addiction medicine, and two psychologists testified that the attacks were too planned to be insane. On May 22 the jury convicted him of first-degree murder after an hour, and on June 25 he was sentenced to life without parole.
He had also been charged with murdering Frank Kellybrew and Darwin Marshall, with assault with intent to murder over the attacks on Bill Fisher, Richard Booker, Etwan Wilson, Da'Von Rawls and Antoine Jackson, and in Ohio with felonious assault over the stabbing of a church janitor, Tony Leno. Prosecutors in Genesee County, Toledo and Leesburg said they would not try those cases while the life sentence stood. The Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the conviction on June 10, 2014, rejecting arguments over the venue, over his being called a serial killer at trial and over the evidence of the other attacks, and the Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear the case on November 25, 2014. The survivors' cases were never heard in court.
On May 2, 2017, under an agreement that gave him immunity from prosecution, he confessed to the unsolved 2009 murder of his Leesburg neighbor, Jammie Lane.