Suspect Identified in Vista Gardens Marketplace Stabbing

Police identified and charged the woman arrested after a Tuesday morning stabbing at a Lanham shopping center.

Antoinette C. Starks, 55, of Bowie was charged with attempted first- and second-degree murder, first- and second-degree assault and assault with a deadly weapon, according to a release from county police.

At around 9:45 a.m. on Tuesday, a witness told an off-duty Prince George’s County Police Officer at the Vista Gardens Marketplace that there was a stabbing outside of the Target store.

The officer found a 39-year-old woman in the parking lot of the Target, suffering from multiple stab wounds. Police say the attack was unprovoked.

Officers found Starks near the Home Depot parking lot, still holding the knives she used to stab the victim. After being ordered to drop the knives, she continued walking through the parking lot. Police said they used a taser to subdue Starks and took her into custody, then taking her to a local hospital where she was listed in stable condition.

The preliminary investigation revealed that Starks had taken the knives from the Shopper’s Food Warehouse in the same shopping center and later attacked the 39-year-old while she was putting her bags in her vehicle in the Target parking lot, according to police.

Prince George’s police confirmed to ABC7 that Starks is the same woman involved in a similar attack in 2005 in a store in Bethesda, during which two women were stabbed. Starks reportedly chased shoppers with four butcher knives in the 2005 incident that happened a day following her release from prison, where she had been serving time for malicious destruction of property, the Washington Post reported in April.

The April Washington Post report detailed a ruling by a Montgomery County judge that Nordstrom should pay $1.6 million to the two women stabbed in 2005 for not giving adequate warning of the attack.

In the same story, the Post reported that Starks, a paranoid schizophrenic who had been declared not criminally responsible in the 2005 crime, had recently been recommended for release from the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, a state mental hospital.

Citing a report from an administrative law judge, the Post reported Starks had been free of symptoms since May of 2007. The judge’s report recommended that Starks be “released to a group home, take medications as prescribed, not possess weapons and abide by other conditions,” the Post reported.

ABC7 reported that Starks was armed with two pairs of knives taped together in Monday's incident.

A 2005 Washington Post story following the Nordstrom incident reported that Starks was armed with four knives in that attack, two of them taped together to create a double blade.

Starks was being held at the Prince George's County Correctional Facility without bond as of Tuesday night.