At least 6 straphangers attacked during violent day in NYC subway system
It’s been hell for city straphangers over the past day, with at least six riders either stabbed or beaten — including a good Samaritan simply coming to the aid of a woman being harassed on a Bronx train.
The victims also included a man stabbed in the chest after his attacker hissed, “Why are you looking at me?” and another straphanger shot by a gel pellet gun and robbed of his prescription eyeglasses, according to cops and police sources.
In the Bronx incident, the 54-year-old Samaritan was knifed in the left elbow when he confronted Lason Robinson, 42, for bothering a woman on a No. 4 train as it pulled into the East 149th Street and Grand Concourse station around 9 p.m. Sunday, authorities said.
The injured do-gooder told The Post on Monday, “I’m feeling OK.
“My arm hurts a little bit, but I’m OK. I got stitches, but I’m all right,” insisted the man, who asked not to be named.
“I just didn’t want anything to happen to the woman or the child,” he said, adding that he’d do the same thing again in a heartbeat.
Nothing was immediately known about a child being present on the train at the time of the attack.
Robinson was arrested at the scene and charged with assault and criminal possession of a weapon, cops said Monday.
Hours later in Queens, a 23-year-old man was riding an A train near the Lefferts Boulevard station just before 2 a.m. Monday when another rider confronted him, snarling, “Why are you looking at me?” according to cops and police sources.
The men began arguing, and when the train pulled into the 111th Street station, they got off, and the suspect stabbed the victim once in the chest, authorities said.
The wounded rider was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in stable condition.
The violence occurred hours after after a 34-year-old man was riding a southbound No. 7 train at Main Street in Flushing around 4:30 p.m. Sunday when the male suspects approached him and “began to harass him,” cops said.
Then they punched him and fired a “gel shot imitation pistol” toward him, police said. Such “guns” use water-absorbing polymer beads as “ammo.”
The suspects tried to grab the victim’s gold chain but were unsuccessful, and when he got off the train at the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street station, they swiped his prescription eyeglasses off his face, smacked him and fled, police said. The disturbing incidents were just part of fewer than 24 hours of violence on the city’s subways.
On Monday around 2:40 a.m., a 25-year-old man also was slashed in the forehead during a clash with a stranger on a J train near the Cypress Hills station in Brooklyn, authorities said.
He was taken to the hospital in stable condition, police said.
In The Bronx, another man was riding a southbound No. 4 train at the 138th Street/Grand Concourse station around 10 p.m. Sunday when a mugger hit him in the head with a gun and grabbed his wallet, police sources said.
The male suspect, joined by a woman, fled out of the station, according to the sources.
The victim suffered bruising to his face.
Earlier Sunday, a 44-year-old man was stabbed in the neck after getting into an argument with a man about half his age on a Bronx subway platform, cops said.
The 44-year-old victim was standing on the No. 6 train platform at the Morrison Avenue-Soundview Station in the Bronx around 7:15 a.m. when he clashed with 24-year-old Jared Johnson, according to police.
During the fight, Johnson jabbed a sharp object into the older man’s neck, according to police.
The victim was rushed to Jacobi Hospital in stable condition.
Johnson initially fled from the station but was later arrested on assault and harassment charges, cops said.
It’s unclear whether the two men knew each other.
