PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Police have arrested a woman they said stabbed another woman to death during a planned fight that escalated in North Philadelphia on Monday and has circulated on social media since.
Police apprehended 22-year-old Zayahshay Davis near 12th and Huntingdon streets in North Philly on Wednesday. Authorities said Davis was the woman seen on video stabbing 28-year-old Sariah Conover during an altercation Monday evening.
“It was a physical altercation, a fistfight that escalated when Ms. Davis stabbed Ms. Conover,” said Lt. Thomas Walsh.
The fight, Walsh indicated, was pre-planned. Davis is the mother of a child of Conover’s ex-boyfriend. It happened around 5:50 p.m. around 13th Street and Lehigh Avenue.
In the chaotic video that has circulated social media, Davis was seen stabbing Conover multiple times with a long knife not long after they engaged one another. Another fight also broke out between two males, identified as Conover’s brother and ex-boyfriend.
In the aftermath on video, Conover was seen being led to a car with her white shirt bloodied from the stab wounds. She died at the hospital just before 1:30 in the morning on Tuesday.
“Social media is now part of our everyday life, it’s part of our consciousness. People’s automatic response is to pull out a camera and start recording,” Walsh observed. “You just have to be responsible. You have to understand what you’re recording. And sometimes the better course of action probably would have been to call 911.”
Charges have yet to be announced.
