NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) – A spate of attacks in the subway over the weekend—including a shoving, a punching, and a slashing—has again put attention on violence in the transit system.
All three reported assaults happened on the A/C/E lines in Manhattan, two of them near or at Penn Station.
The latest attack was around 8 p.m. Sunday on the mezzanine level of the 168th Street A/C station in Washington Heights, where a woman repeatedly punched a 17-year-old girl in the face during an argument.
When an 18-year-old man tried to stop the assault, the woman stole his phone and fled the scene. The teen was hospitalized at New York–Presbyterian Hospital in stable condition.
Just a few hours before that, around 5 p.m. at the 34th Street–Penn Station stop, a 64-year-old man was on his phone at an A/C/E platform when a man in his 30s kicked him in the back, sending him plummeting onto the tracks.
Good Samaritans helped the victim back onto the platform, and he was transported by EMS to Lenox Health Greenwich Village to be treated for various injuries, including to his back. The attacker fled the scene.
And on Monday, the NYPD released a surveillance image of a man wanted in Friday night's slashing near the 34th Street–Penn Station stop—an unprovoked attack that's being investigated as a hate crime.
A 27-year-old man was on a northbound A train approaching the station around 11 p.m., when another man hurled anti-gay insults at him and slashed him with a box cutter, police said.
The victim was taken in stable condition to NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, where he was being treated for defensive slash wounds to his hands.
The suspects in all three attacks fled the scenes and were still at large Monday, according to police.
Transit violence was up 13.2% in January and February of this year compared to the same two-month period in 2023, according to the latest NYPD statistics. Officials have surged 1,000 police officers into the transit system in response.
Several headline-grabbing subway attacks in recent weeks have put the spotlight back on transit violence, including the life-threatening slashing of a subway conductor on an A train in Bedford-Stuyvesant last Thursday, as well as a fatal shooting on a D train in Fordham Heights on Feb. 23. About a week before that shooting, a mass shooting on a 4 train in Mount Eden left a bystander dead and five others wounded.
"The trains now, it's just—it's horrible, horrible," one woman told 1010 WINS on Monday. "Something has to be done."