Police are searching for a man who stabbed a youth soccer coach and cut off his ear before leaving him to die on a New York City sidewalk near Union Square early Sunday.

Police responded to a call of an assault on West 14th Street at about 4:30 a.m. and discovered 25-year-old Michael Jones lying in a pool of blood with stab wounds to his stomach and neck. His ear had also been cut off, police said.

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“I ran down to the ambulance (down the block) and said, ‘You’d better get down there. There’s a guy on the ground with his throat cut,’” passer-by Malachi Mohamed, 39, told the New York Post.

Jones, a native of Liverpool, England, and soccer coach for the Red Bulls Youth Training Programs, was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital. He lived in West Harrison in Westchester County.

“He coached two of my three sons and was just a great guy. He cared about what he did, and was very dedicated,” Mark Fischer, who oversees refs for the Westchester league, told the Post. “The kids loved him.”

Police released surveillance video of the male suspect believed to have stabbed Jones as they canvassed the neighborhood looking for potential witnesses. Jones' attacker was described as a man between the ages of 25 and 30 with a dark ponytail.

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The New York Red Bulls issued a statement calling Jones a "fantastic coach who loved soccer."

Police sources said that robbery did not appear to be the motive. The investigation is ongoing.

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NYPD

NYPD Officer Eder Loor was stabbed during a confrontation in East Harlem, New York.

A police officer stabbed in the skull while responding to a 911 call "has a shot at a full recovery," according to his doctor, because the knife blade narrowly missed vital brain functions.

NYPD officer Eder Loor, 28, was stabbed in the face and neck and had bleeding on the brain when he arrived at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan Tuesday afternoon, officials told NBC New York.

Dr. Joshua Bederson, professor and chair of neurosurgery at the hospital, said Loor would be uncomfortable for a while and would have low energy, but said "my guess is that within a month he'll be bugging me about getting back to work."

Overall, he said, Loor is "as lucky as you get." The knife, he said, went deep into Loor's temporal lobe and nicked an artery that, if it had been cut, likely would have killed him.

The New York Times reported that the folding knife’s three-inch blade passed half an inch below structures that control motor functions and another half-inch from structures that control vision. It touched the nerve that gives sensation to the face and nicked, but did not penetrate, a major artery.

“It was a millimeter (0.04 of an inch) from everything; it was ridiculous,” Bederson told the New York Times. “You don’t want to overemphasize, but he was at death’s door. He was minutes away from crashing.”

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Loor's pregnant wife, Dina, said her husband loves his job and will surely want to return to it.

"This is his passion, this is what he's lived for ... he doesn't quit ... he wants more and more in life," she told NBC New York.

Loor had been responding to a 911 call in East Harlem by the suspect's mother, who had called police saying her son needed to go to a hospital because he was "acting in an erratic manner."

The suspect, Terrence Hale, has several previous arrests, one for assault with a knife, officials said. A law enforcement official said police officers had been called several times to the home where he lives with his mother.

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The officers were escorting him out of the apartment building when he suddenly produced a knife and began stabbing Loor. He fled but was caught two blocks away.

He was undergoing a psych evaluation at Metropolitan Hospital. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney.

Dina Loor, 25, told the New York Times that she had brought their four-and-a-half-year-old daughter into her husband’s room for a bedside visit. The girl was happy “to see her dad,” Loor said.

Their next child, a boy, is due in July, the newspaper said. 

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FLORENCE, SC -- Police say a 9-year-old girl stabbed her grandmother in the back after being told to turn off the TV show she was watching, according to news reports.

Police told the Florence Morning News and other local news outlets that the incident occurred after the child's mother left the house and the girl began to argue with her grandmother about turning the TV back on.

As the older woman was sitting down reading a newspaper, the girl approached her with a kitchen knife and stabbed her in the back, said Florence Police Maj. Carlos Raines told NBC affiliate WMBF-TV.

The grandmother was treated and released from the hospital, while the Department of Social Services placed the child in the custody of another relative, Raines told the paper.

The girl, whose name was not released because of her age, will be charged in family court, the Morning News reported. She was placed in the custody of another relative while she awaits charges in family court.

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EL CAJON, Calif. -- A 10-year-old boy is suspected to have stabbed a 12-year-old friend to death with a kitchen knife, according to authorities.

The older boy died Monday at a hospital after he was taken from his friend's home in El Cajon, about 15 miles east of San Diego. The mother of the 10-year-old was at home at the time of the stabbing, according to the U-T San Diego newspaper.

San Diego County sheriff's officials took the 10-year-old into custody. Sheriff's homicide Lt. Larry Nesbit said, "the case will be up to the juvenile justice system."

It remained unclear whether the boy had been booked into the juvenile detention system. His name has not been released because of his age. The sheriff's office did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press.

Neighbors said the 12-year-old boy lived in a nearby mobile home park but the two friends attended different schools.

'Temper tantrums'
A neighbor of the younger boy, 18-year-old Derek Gorton, told the newspaper the child had emotional issues, and that something as small as tapping him on the shoulder the wrong way or losing at a video game could spark outrage.

"Even though he threw temper tantrums, we never thought he'd do anything like this," said Gorton.

Gorton's father, Brian Richeson, said the boy usually had verbal outbursts, but he hadn't seen him throwing things or hitting others. He praised the boy's mother, saying she had dealt with her son's problems head-on.

"She was the best mom I've ever met," Richeson told the U-T. "She knew how to take care of him if he was yelling and screaming."

Point Loma family psychologist Rochelle Perper told the U-T that charging the 10-year-old as an adult would be a "big stretch," particularly if mental health issues were found.

"More likely there will be a lot more psychological care. The focus should be on rehabilitating someone that young," she told the paper.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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