Psychiatric examiners will determine whether the woman accused of stabbing a mother while she was changing her 10-month-old baby girl inside the Macy’s Herald Square bathroom is fit to stand trial.
A Manhattan Supreme Court judge on Wednesday ordered the psych evaluation for 43-year-old Kerri Aherne during her indictment on charges including attempted murder, assault and acting in a manner injurious to a child for stabbing the 39-year-old tourist from California on Dec. 11.
If examiners determine that Aherne — a Massachusetts native who spent most of her life as a patient in mental hospitals — is not mentally fit to assist in her defense, she will be hospitalized indefinitely and the state’s case against her will grind to a halt.
“The only ballgame right now is her health,” said Kevin Sylvan, an attorney for Aherne. “That’s the only relevant issue right now.”
Aherne was released from a New York psych hospital the morning of the attack and went to the Macy’s flagship store on W. 34th St. near Sixth Ave., where she purchased a knife just moments before entering a seventh-floor bathroom where the victim was changing her baby girl around 3:13 p.m.
The woman told police she was focusing on her child when she felt a sharp pain in her back, a police source with knowledge of the case said. A moment later, she realized that she had been stabbed.
In a desperate attempt to protect her baby, the victim whirled around, confronted Aherne and grabbed the knife in the stranger’s hand, her infant child falling from the changing table onto the floor during the scuffle, cops said. Eventually wresting the knife away from the attacker, she threw it to the other end of the bathroom.
Store security responded and held Aherne until police arrived.
Medics rushed the victim to Bellevue Hospital, where she received stitches to close stab wounds to her back.
Aherne arrived in New York City during the summer of 2024, after she walked out of her mental hospital in Massachusetts on a temporary leave pass and hopped an Uber to New York, where she soon became a patient at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island.
“[She] said she could not tolerate hospitals any longer and wanted to go to prison rather than be returned to a hospital,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Paul Barker said at Aherne’s arraignment in December.
Aherne is facing up to 25 years in prison for the attack. She’s due back in court on Feb. 11.
