FARGO — During the first week of spring, the city of Fargo recorded its first homicide of 2024 when two men began fighting in the early morning hours of March 28 inside Southtown Pourhouse.

Bar staff evicted the two men. Minutes later, in the parking lot, prosecutors say Michael Diedrich stabbed Ethan Larson, 22.

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Larson was taken to a local hospital, where he died. Diedrich, 28, drove away from the scene but was arrested about 12 hours later, according to court documents. He later pleaded not guilty to the murder charges.

In the following months, there were a few minor stabbings and assaults on the subway, but none had serious consequences.

According to crime data from the Fargo Police Department and the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, stabbings and incidents involving sharp objects decreased significantly during this period in the city of Fargo and decreased slightly statewide compared to 2023.

In July and August, an alarming series of high-profile knife incidents took a heavy toll on law enforcement in the region and raised concerns about what appeared to be a growing trend in knife attacks and related attacks.

The spike in cases began on July 15, when Alexander Anderson, 38, died from a fatal stabbing in his West Fargo apartment. His girlfriend, Robyn Lee, 31, was initially arrested and jailed on suspicion of murdering him, but she was released three days later without formal charges.

Not much else is known about Anderson’s death. West Fargo Police Chief Pete Nielsen said his department is still investigating, but stressed that Anderson’s death has not been ruled a homicide.

On August 4, Connie Jo Frank, 48, fatally stabbed her boyfriend, Willard DeGroat, 47, in Moorhead, the city’s third homicide of the year.

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Frank admitted to grabbing a kitchen knife and stabbing DeGroat after he came to her son’s home where she was staying, according to court documents. As he was being taken to the Clay County Jail in a police vehicle, Frank said, according to the complaint, “I’ll kill him again.”

State prosecutors took the rare step of convening a grand jury to indict Frank in the case. Her attorneys filed a motion signaling she would use a self-defense claim to challenge the second-degree murder charge against her.

A week later, a Fargo man punched a man on a busy downtown street corner before stabbing a woman four times in the chest and throwing a knife at another woman just as the city’s pride parade was ending, according to police reports.

Michael Anthony Hurteau, 35, faces criminal charges of attempted murder, aggravated assault and terrorism in connection with the stabbing in downtown Fargo.

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On August 15, Moorhead police responded to a south Moorhead apartment where a 43-year-old man had been stabbed in the neck with a knife.

The man told police he invited Mary Hjelseth, 36, to his home and she attacked him without provocation, then left while he went to a neighbor’s house to ask for help. Hjelseth was arrested the next day on charges of attempted murder, domestic violence and assault.

Then, on August 19, 14-year-old Jaelyn Walker was stabbed to death on the banks of the Red River, days before her first day at Moorhead High School.

A Fargo teenager and her ex-boyfriend, Isaac Arndt, are charged with Walker’s murder. Arndt, 18, admitted to investigators that he stabbed Walker more than a dozen times, according to court documents. A Change.org petition has been launched urging prosecutors to convene a grand jury to charge Arndt with first-degree murder.

Walker’s death was torturous for the community and for the understaffed Moorhead Police Department, which Chief Shannon Monroe said was already feeling the brunt of the sudden wave of violent attacks.

“The team of officers that responded that night was the third homicide that month,” Monroe said in late August of Walker’s death. “One of the officers on that team was a former school resource officer who knew her from school. It was particularly difficult, not just for our department, but for so many people: the family, the community, the schools.”

Although the region has seen more than its share of worrying knife attacks recently, BCI data suggests that the apparent epidemic of knife attacks is not an aberration from a typical year.

According to BCI data, Fargo averages 50 stabbings or stabbings per year, or four per month. Fargo Police Capt. Bill Ahlfeldt acknowledged that the use of knives in fatal and nonfatal attacks in recent months has created a perception that stabbings are on the rise.

“If you compare the numbers, there were more knife attacks in 2023 than there were in 2024,” he said. “That’s human behaviour – people are people. You just can’t predict these things. You would think that knives would be more common this year, but statistically, that’s just not the case.”

According to Ahlfeldt, knife attacks are classified as serious assaults, the vast majority of which are committed by people who are not armed at all, but instead use their hands and feet to carry out the assault. He added that there is no particular trend in the type of weapons people use to commit these types of crimes.

However, Monroe said the number of stabbings has raised alarms and strained overburdened departments like Moorhead’s, which is currently short more than a dozen officers.

“For us alone, we’ve had so many (stabbings) in the last few weeks,” he said. “It seems like the whole metropolis has seen more this summer. For my officers, it’s just one thing after another and they’re feeling the brunt of it.”

Monroe said it was difficult to find a common thread between the incidents, but a combination of substance abuse and mental health issues appeared to be at the root of many of them.

“There’s such a contrast in mentality between stabbings and gun attacks,” Monroe said. “A stabbing is a personal, up-close act, and the ones we’ve experienced have been so violent and disturbing – there’s an extremely disturbing psychology behind it.”

Kevin Thompson, a criminal justice professor at NDSU, said he doesn’t see a trend connecting the recent increase in stabbings in the metro area.

“I don’t think there’s a long-term trend here. Generally, if people really want to hurt someone – if they’re seriously threatening or being threatened by someone – they’re going to use a gun,” he said.

Thompson said stabbings are much more common in other countries than in the United States because of tighter gun restrictions in other countries. He added that people who are not allowed to carry guns, such as felons or people with medical diagnoses that prohibit gun ownership, are actually not the most likely to commit a knife attack. Rather, he added, the people who use knives are usually those who simply don’t feel comfortable carrying guns.

“Knife attacks like these are often carried out by people who don’t want to carry a firearm for fear of causing serious harm and killing someone,” Thompson said. “Sometimes these are people who are in disadvantaged situations – sometimes mentally incapacitated, sometimes homeless – who carry knives, usually for protection. But when they’re involved in a conflict, the knife comes out.”

Thompson said there were some commonalities among the local crimes, however, noting that two of them involved women.

“Women tend to be a little more uncomfortable with a gun, especially when they’re carrying a gun, owning a gun,” he said. “And women are better with knives — I don’t mean that in a sexist or stereotypical way — but because of their traditional role, women just have more experience with using and being around knives,” he said.

Thompson said people who use guns to commit a crime often don’t want to get close to their victim, while many knife attacks tend to be more personal in nature.

“On average, gun crimes happen at a distance of about 1.5 to 1.8 metres,” he said. “However, when you’re talking about people involved in a conflict, and particularly if alcohol is involved or if they’re committing crimes of passion, those people are in much closer contact, and in those cases they’re using a knife, either as a form of protection or to commit a crime.”