Elias Abuelazam
- Victims
- 5 - 1 conviction, for the first-degree murder of Arnold Minor, and 4 further killings attributed to him in the Flint stabbings that were never brought to trial
- Years active
- March 2009-August 2010
- Location
- Michigan/Virginia/Ohio, USA
- Method
- Stabbing with knife
- Status
- Convicted by a Genesee County jury in Michigan of the first-degree premeditated murder of Arnold Minor, stabbed to death in Flint on August 2, 2010, and sentenced on June 25, 2012 to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. That is the only count he was tried on. He had also been charged with five counts of assault with intent to murder and one of malicious destruction of property in Michigan, and was indicted by a grand jury in Toledo, Ohio for felonious assault and attempted murder over the stabbing of a church custodian who survived; Genesee County prosecutors said they would not bring the remaining cases to trial unless the Minor conviction was overturned on appeal. The Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the conviction on June 10, 2014, rejecting arguments that the trial judge should have granted a change of venue, that he was described as a serial killer during the trial, and that evidence of the other attacks should not have been admitted. The Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal on November 25, 2014. He remains in a maximum-security prison in Michigan.
Abuelazam was born on August 28, 1976 in Israel, of Arab Christian family, and had lived in the United States on and off. In 2010 he was working in a shop in Flint, Michigan. The Michigan press called him the Flint Serial Killer and the Serial Slasher.
Between May and August 2010 he approached men on foot at night, asked for directions or help with a car, and stabbed them. Eighteen men were attacked in Michigan, Virginia and Ohio. Five died. Sixteen of the eighteen were Black, and the Flint attacks caused men in the city to stop walking at night.
The five who died were David Motley, thirty-one; Emmanuel Abdul Muhammad, fifty-nine; Darwin Marshall, forty-three; Frank Kellybrew, sixty; and Arnold Minor, forty-nine.
He was arrested on August 11, 2010 at Atlanta airport, holding a ticket to Israel.
He was convicted in Michigan and sentenced on June 25, 2012 to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Charges in the other states followed.
The racial pattern was central to the investigation and to the local reaction, and the entry states it plainly: he selected Black men in a city with a majority Black population, and the men had done nothing except be outside.