Wendell Barnes, a 26-year-old Black/African American man, was fatally stabbed in Rochester, New York, on December 30, 1980. Barnes was waiting at a bus stop on East Main Street when he was attacked and stabbed in the chest; he was taken to a hospital but the wound proved fatal. Reports describe the killing as sudden and do not identify a robbery or a personal dispute as a motive.

Barnes’s death occurred amid a string of late-December knife attacks that investigators began to view as connected. Authorities later focused suspicion on Joseph Gerard Christopher, an Army private from Buffalo who was on leave from Fort Benning during the period and whose statements and recovered items linked him to a wider pattern of racially targeted attacks and .22-caliber shootings across western New York and Manhattan.

Did anyone who knew Barnes or who was in that East Main Street area on December 30, 1980, see or hear anything that could help clarify what happened?