Rhode Island Ruled Him Incompetent for 23 Years and Let Him Walk. Now a Toddler Was Stabbed in Her Stroller.

A 2-year-old girl was stabbed repeatedly in the face while sitting in her stroller at a Providence, Rhode Island, school bus stop on October 7, 2026. The man charged with the attack, 46-year-old Nelson Blanco, had already been accused of stabbing two 7-year-old boys in the same city in 2003, and Rhode Island has found him incompetent to stand trial again and again in the 23 years since.

He was not in a hospital when this happened. He was not in prison. He was walking free, because in July a judge accepted a doctor’s opinion that he was not a danger to anyone.

An attack at the bus stop

According to the Boston Globe, the girl and her 26-year-old mother were near Broad Street at about 1:50 p.m. that Wednesday, waiting for the girl’s siblings to get off a school bus. Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said Blanco made insulting comments to the mother first, Fox News reported. Surveillance video, as described by police to Boston 25 News, shows the mother and daughter trying to move away from him before he grabbed the stroller and struck the child multiple times.

Prosecutors said the little girl was stabbed multiple times in the face. Her mother was stabbed in the shoulder; she was treated and released. Police say there is no evidence Blanco knew either of them, and police have called the attack “completely random.”

A bystander tried to intervene, and police say Blanco tried to stab that person too before running. A witness named Jesse Alice Palmer, 34, pressed on the girl’s wounds and performed CPR when the child stopped breathing, the Globe reported. The toddler was taken to Hasbro Children’s Hospital in critical condition, and Chief Perez said she was “fighting for her life.”

Blanco ran to a home on Daboll Street and locked himself in the basement. Officers found him there and arrested him. Prosecutors said a bloodied knife was found inside a panel box down there. Police told Boston 25 that he confessed and admitted he did not live in the house.

According to a police report obtained by WPRI and cited by Fox News, Blanco told detectives he stopped because he was on a main street: “If I was on a side street, I would have killed them. Both of them.”

The charges

Blanco faces two counts of assault with intent to commit murder, one for the mother and one for the daughter, along with assault with a deadly weapon, breaking and entering the dwelling of a person over 60, possession of a knife while committing a crime of violence, and possession of a knife with a blade longer than three inches.

He appeared in Providence District Court on October 8 and entered no plea. Boston 25 reported that he was ordered held on $200,000 as a bail violator. The court also ordered a competency evaluation and a dangerousness assessment, and his next court date is October 22. The charges are allegations, and he has not been convicted of anything in this case.

Twenty-three years of “incompetent”

Here is the part that should make every parent in Rhode Island furious. This was not a first encounter with the justice system. It was the latest stop on a road the state has been paving for more than two decades.

• 2003: Blanco was charged after two 7-year-old boys were stabbed while playing on Corinth Street in Providence. NBC10’s I-Team, which reviewed the court records, described that attack as “random and unprovoked.” Both boys survived. He was found incompetent to stand trial and sent to Eleanor Slater Hospital, the state psychiatric facility.
• 2007: According to the Globe, the state’s behavioral health agency concluded there was “no reasonable likelihood that in the foreseeable future Nelson Blanco will become competent.” The criminal case ended there.
• 2018: After being charged the year before with possession of a stolen vehicle, he was again deemed incompetent, the attorney general’s office said. Court documents said doctors found he “has an Intellectual Disability Disorder and Schizophrenia.”
• 2024: He was charged with felony domestic violence and a misdemeanor domestic assault in North Providence, after allegedly breaking into his sister’s house through a window.

In July 2026, in that domestic violence case, Blanco was found incompetent yet again. The evaluating doctor recommended outpatient treatment, writing that he was “not likely to imperil the peace and safety of the community or himself at this time.” Judge Brian Stern accepted the recommendation, NBC10 reported, and Blanco stayed on the street.

The red flags were in the file all along. The NBC10 review found that evaluators in the 2000s called him “paranoid” and “out of touch with reality,” repeatedly rated him at “moderate risk of creating a likelihood of serious harm to others,” and that one doctor warned he could “become overly violent” without treatment. The records do not show when or why he was discharged from Eleanor Slater. The state Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals declined to explain his releases, citing patient privacy laws.

“The system failed everybody”

The people closest to this have no trouble naming the problem. “The system failed everybody,” Palmer, the witness who fought to keep the little girl breathing, told the Globe.

Andy Lopez, one of the boys stabbed in 2003, now grown, put it more simply to WPRI, as quoted by Fox News: “He was given a chance 23 years ago, and 23 years later, he did the same thing.”

Chief Perez sees it differently. “I don’t think the system is broken,” he said, according to the Globe, adding that the courts are ultimately responsible for holding defendants accountable.

With respect to the chief, a system that labels a man permanently incompetent, cannot try him, cannot keep him, and then signs off on his freedom with a note that he is unlikely to hurt anyone is not working. Competency law exists so that people too ill to understand a courtroom are not railroaded through one. That is a real principle. But it was never meant to become a revolving door, where the most dangerous defendants are the ones the state can neither convict nor confine. Rhode Island had 23 years of warnings, a stack of evaluations calling this man a risk to others, and a July hearing where somebody had to decide whether he was safe. Somebody decided he was.

Now a toddler has been fighting for her life in critical condition, and a mother who did everything right, who saw the danger and tried to walk away from it, has to live with what happened next.

Rhode Island didn’t need a crystal ball to protect that little girl; it just needed to read its own file on Nelson Blanco.

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