A man put his hunting knife on Razia’s counter. The next day, another was stabbed to death

November 9, 2026 — 5:57pm

The man pulled out the hunting knife and jammed it into the tiny crevice of his car key, slamming his fist into it on the yellow convenience store counter as he tried to crack it open.

Looking down at the batteries she had retrieved from a back shelf, Razia Rani didn’t notice the weapon until she was in the confines of her little glass booth.

When the City Mart worker saw it – “a horrible knife, big knife” with a menacing curved blade – she took a step back, terrified. She thought about calling the police, but what would that do?

Thieves and people making threats often came back anyway, and the man had said barely a word to her, she said.

Frightening encounters like this might be commonplace in this pocket of businesses in Melbourne’s CBD, near Queen Victoria Market, but just one day after the run-in, another man – 51-year-old Roberto Urbano – allegedly stabbed 47-year-old delivery rider Feng Jianming to death metres from the convenience store where Rani works. Urbano, who faced court on Monday, is charged with murder and intentionally causing serious injury.

Rani gestured to the neighbouring liquor store, where she said there’s an incident “every week”.

“Someone is coming, taking the booze. They run away. Sometimes we are chasing. Sometimes we just ignore it,” she said, explaining that while sometimes workers call police, other times they are “just too tired”.

“We are facing a difficulty to find the night staff especially, because this shop is 24/7,” she said. “We are begging staff to … come work.”

Police door-knocked businesses in A’Beckett Street and surrounds on Monday, while staff at a hotel hung large black sheets over their windows to shield their lobby from the masses of floral tributes and candles left for Feng outside a hot pot restaurant on the neighbouring Frederick Way, where he lay dying on Friday night.

Riders for the since-criticised delivery service HungryPanda – the service Feng was working for when he and another rider were allegedly attacked – filtered in and out of the restaurant on Monday, collecting meals in plastic takeaway containers and packing them into thermal yellow delivery bags.

Karan Gaddam was among them, and said local rough sleepers would sometimes steal meals from unattended bags while riders went inside restaurants. “I see the people in the street come and take the order,” Gaddam said.

Another rider, Ming Ku, said he picked up from the area often. “It’s not safe,” he said, shaking his head. “You see someone maybe push the bike [over] and you can’t do anything.”

Detectives believe an altercation broke out when Feng and the fellow delivery rider who was injured confronted a man they caught tampering with their bikes.

Nearby resident Maria Vystavkina said the inner-city area felt safe even at night, and horrific instances of violence could happen anywhere.

“I live in the area. I saw this on the news and thought, oh my god,” she said. “Every now and then you hear these things ...”

But some local workers believe the area is volatile because of a high concentration of people with untreated mental health and substance abuse issues. One cafe worker, Alex, who asked that his surname not to be published, because of privacy concerns, said more police would be welcome in the area to help keep people safe.

“We [workers] don’t really talk about it because it is a very bad incident. We just want to, for a moment, get [things] back together,” he said. “It’s something that we will always remember.”

Jo Stafford, police assistant commissioner for the north-west metro region, said at a press conference in the CBD on Monday that there was no way policing could solve the problem alone.

The Salvation Army’s Major Brendan Nottle said an increasing number of vulnerable people in the city were arming themselves with knives and other weapons for protection in lieu of that support.

“Those people feel unwelcome, unprotected, and that is deeply concerning to us,” Nottle said.

Melbourne Lord Mayor Nick Reece repeatedly asked whether it was time to “bring back the asylums”. “Has this de-institutionalisation worked? Do we need to bring back asylums?”

Reece later said he was not necessarily calling for asylums to return to Melbourne, but rather wanted a community conversation and expert advice on how to tackle a rise in violence involving people experiencing acute mental illness.

Frustrated experts have for years said they know how to fix the issue and pointed to years of government inaction preventing a chronically underfunded mental health system from keeping up with relentless demand.

After Feng’s death, Rani at City Mart decided she would call police about the other man with the knife, who made himself a cup of coffee before collecting his weapon and leaving the store.

The man didn’t verbally threaten her, Rani said. But after the delivery rider’s death, she was reminded it’s her duty to inform – whether anyone was arrested or not.

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