(Thomas P. Costello/Asbury Park Press)
WHY? Tyrik Haynes (left) allegedly stabbed Kerri Dalton (right, with daughter Anna Lynne) without motive. (
)
It was a bloodbath — and beyond.
Cops are scrambling to find the motive behind the savage stabbing of a mom at a Bed Bath & Beyond in a New Jersey mall allegedly by a teen who’s also accused of torching a cat last month.
Tyrik Haynes, 18, stabbed Kerri Dalton, 29, more than 20 times as she shopped for curtains and wheeled her infant in a stroller in the Middletown store Thursday, police said.
The apparently random attack left Dalton soaked in blood and with two punctured lungs — but the plucky mom from nearby Keansburg was still able to call 911, authorities said.
She was rushed to Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune and listed as critical, but her condition improved to good on Friday. Her 5-month-old child, Anna Lynne, was unhurt.
“She’s doing better,” the victim’s brother-in-law, Charles Dalton, 40, told The Post.
“She just felt, like, pricks at her neck, like someone would tap your shoulder. She didn’t realize she was getting stabbed at first.”
Haynes, of Middletown Township, was charged with attempted murder, child endangerment and weapon possession.
The Middletown HS North graduate had been previously charged with burning an adopted cat to death with a makeshift torch on Christmas Eve, police said.
Haynes allegedly toted the hapless feline into the woods in a cat carrier and cruelly blasted it with flame from a lighted aerosol can, according to the Monmouth County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
“We found the cat a week and a half ago in the wooded area,” agency representative Victor Amato told the Asbury Park Press. “It was dead from burns.”
Amato spotted Haynes Monday at a Petco in Middletown, in the same mall as the Bed Bath & Beyond, after workers called to tell him the suspected cat killer was lurking about.
“They said he was walking back and forth in front of the store, eyeing people and looking in windows,” Amato said. “I stayed for an hour to make sure he didn’t come back.”
A public defender declined comment after Haynes’ court appearance Friday in the stabbing case.
His client is due back in court in the animal-cruelty case on Feb. 11.
Additional reporting by Kate Kowsh