19 Victims Mourned 2 Years after Sagamihara Care Home Stabbing

July 26, 2018

Sagamihara, Kanagawa Pref.- The 19 people killed in a stabbing rampage at a care home for disabled people in the city of Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, were remembered on Thursday, which marked the second anniversary of the tragic incident.

Kanagawa Governor Yuji Kuroiwa and others laid flowers at an altar set up in front of the facility, Tsukui Yamayuri-en. Junichi Miyoshi, a 43-year-old elementary school teacher from the city of Akashi in the western prefecture of Hyogo, placed messages he and his colleagues wrote for the victims on the altar.

Miyoshi, who teaches children with special needs, said that he takes the incident as equal to an attack on his students. "We won't waste the deaths of the 19 victims," he pledged.

At the Kanagawa government office in Yokohama, the capital of the prefecture, staff employees, including those at the department for the welfare of disabled people, observed a moment of silence for the victims at 9 a.m. (midnight Wednesday GMT).

The welfare department workers were wearing T-shirts with a message reading, "Tomo ni Ikiru" (Live Together), on it.

"I hope to see a society come where people with and without disabilities are both treated equally," said a 23-year-old male employee at the department.

The rampage was committed by Satoshi Uematsu, 28, a former worker at Tsukui Yamayuri-en, in the small hours of July 26, 2016. All of the 19 victims were residents of the care home. Twenty-seven people, including staff workers of the facility, were injured in the knife attack.

Uematsu was indicted in February 2017 on suspicion of murder and attempted murder. But it remains unclear when Uematsu's trial will start because a second psychiatric examination is being conducted on him.

Work is under way to demolish Tsukui Yamayuri-en's residential buildings, where the knife attack took place. Residents who survived the assault now live at places including a Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility in Konan Ward in Yokohama.

The Kanagawa prefectural government plans to build new residential buildings at the Sagamihara site of Tsukui Yamayuri-en, with their completion slated for fiscal 2021. Jiji Press