NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — A 29-year-old man was attacked with a sword encased in a wooden sheath inside a Lower Manhattan subway station during the Thursday morning rush, police said.
Police said an argument broke out between the two around 9:30 a.m. onboard a northbound A train as it approached the Chambers Street station at Park Place and Church Street.
Rebecca Strassberg, an eyewitness and lifelong New Yorker, told 1010 WINS' Newsline with Brigitte Quinn that the suspect entered the train and asked a woman standing in front of the two doors that connect the train cars to move and "seemed to do that with a little haste."
"He stood between the two cars for a while, and me and another woman just sort of watched for a moment because we [were] not sure what he was going to do next, and then, out of nowhere, he just opened those other doors to that car and just whipped out a weapon," she said. "Everybody in our car fled to the front and everybody in that car fled to the back, and it looked like he was sort of engaging in some sort of combat."
Both of them got off the train, and the suspect struck the victim on the top of his head with a sheathed sword.
Police said the suspect, who was dressed in all black and wearing a black baseball cap with a logo, dropped the sheath as he fled the station southbound. No arrests have been made.
The victim suffered a deep laceration to his head and was rushed by EMS to New York- Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital in stable condition.
Sources told the Daily News that the victim was previously arrested on a felony charge for putting rice cookers in a Manhattan subway station in 2019. It's unclear if the suspect knew the victim.
It's just the latest New York City transit attack and comes less than 12 hours after a 26-year-old subway rider was repeatedly stabbed on a northbound 2 train at the 72nd Street station on the Upper West Side Thursday night.
The violence has included multiple subway shovings as well as random assaults, among them a woman who was beaten and robbed of her eyeglasses on Tuesday.
Strassberg said the exchange happened "so fast," but the rest of her work commute to Columbus Circle "felt like hours."
"I have been riding the subway since I was 13," she added. "I am born and raised in Brooklyn. I have never seen anything quite as violent or scary as that right in front of my eyes ... I'm one of the lucky ones ... I think you really don't understand [the subway safety issue] until it happens just right in front you."
For now, Strassberg said she's taking a break from riding the subway.
Anyone with information in regard to this incident is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS.
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