On Thursday night, a man was pushed onto the subway tracks in New York City by a mumbling woman described by witnesses as ‘Hispanic.’ This is the second time this happened in the month of December. The woman pushed the man in front of the incoming 7 train in Queens and then fled the scene.
The incident happened around 8 p.m. as the man stood on the elevated platform. As the train was pulling into the station, the woman stood up from a bench and shoved the man onto the tracks, according to Paul Browne, a spokesman for the NYPD. The victim has not been identified yet and was standing on the platform with his back towards the woman.
Witnesses described the woman as being in her 20s, roughly 5-foot-5, heavyset and was wearing a blue, white and gray ski jacket along with Nike shoes. The shoes were gray on the top and red on the bottom. It is not yet known if the suspect and the victim knew each other or if any bystanders attempted to help the man prior to his death.
A surveillance video was released on Friday by police of the woman running from the station. The video was recorded at an intersection close to the station and shows a woman running from a crosswalk and down the sidewalk.
When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was asked about the incident, he said that legal and policy changes caused the release of many mentally ill people from psychiatric institutions in the 1960s through the 1990s.
“The courts or the law have changed and said, no, you can’t do that unless they’re a danger to society; our laws protect you. That’s fair enough,” Bloomberg said on a radio interview Friday.
Earlier this month, on the 3rd, Ki-Suck Han was pushed onto the tracks in front of a train in Times Square. Naeem Davis, a 30-year-old homeless man, was charged with murder in Han’s death. He was ordered to be held in jail without bail. Davis said that Han was the aggressor and attacked him first. He has pled not guilty in the case. The two men did not know each other.