In what appeared to be a bizarre and horrific coincidence, two nurses were stabbed hours apart by separate suspects at UCLA-affiliated hospitals in L.A. County over the weekend.

The first incident happened at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar about 2 a.m. yesterday when a suspect with a knife “bypassed” a security screening area and attacked a nurse as guards and cops searched for him, according to the L.A. County Sheriff's Department.

Unfortunately, the nurse …
]
 … was stabbed multiple times in her body, putting her in the ER in critical condition, deputies said.

A sheriff's statement described the scene this way:

As deputies and officers searched the hospital, they heard a woman scream and went to the source of the outcry. They located the victim, a female adult, and found she was stabbed an unknown number of times in the upper and lower torso.

Cops say the attacker is Romero Carnalla, 26, of L.A. He was quickly nabbed, along with a knife, they said.

Carnalla was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and battery, deputies said. He was jailed lieu of $55,000 bail after being hospitalized for unknown reasons.

The second attack happened at 9:20 a.m. Sunday at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance when a man who had cleared the security screening area “encountered a group of nurses, grabbed one of them from behind, and stabbed the female victim in the ear with a sharp object,” according to a sheriff's statement.

That object was a pencil that cops say was recovered at the scene.

The victim pointed to a suspect, and deputies arrested Thomas Robert Fredette, a 38-year-old from Santee, a community in San Diego County.

He was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, according to the sheriff's department, also after being hospitalized for unknown injuries. Fredette's bail was initially set at $130,000, deputies said.

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