Dramatic video footage captured the second a 69-year-old homeless man stabbed the thugs who mercilessly terrorized him on a Queens subway practice, killing one and wounding one other.
In a twist of transit justice, it’s the surviving goons who at the moment are behind bars, prosecutors stated.
“The victim was accosted, without provocation, and our investigation has shown that he defended himself while attempting to retrieve his property,” Queens District Legal professional Melinda Katz stated in an announcement Wednesday.
“As a result, my office will not be filing charges for the fatality.”
Gripping footage of the violent encounter on a 7 practice on Dec. 22 reveals the sufferer sleeping on the practice shortly earlier than 12:30 a.m. when two of the brutes — recognized by prosecutors as Stalin Moya and Oswaldo Walter — seize one of many man’s baggage and take it right into a second automobile.
Moya then goes again and grabs extra of the sufferer’s baggage — waking him up within the course of.
That’s when issues obtained violent.
The unidentified sufferer adopted Moya into the second automobile to attempt to get his issues again, solely to be attacked and pounded by a number of males within the group as they scattered and hid his baggage.
The footage reveals the sufferer then being shoved and slugged repeatedly by the group — till he has sufficient and pulled out a protracted knife and slashed his attackers, wounding a minimum of two.
The cowardly thugs then scatter — one seen stumbling away, bleeding from his wounds — because the sufferer stands in the course of the empty subway automobile, nonetheless clutching the knife.
Queens prosecutors stated Moya was killed and defendant Phillipe Pena was wounded.
Pena, 26, and Walter, 29, and two others — Jose Valencia, 35, and Henry Toapanta, 32 — have now been indicted by a grand jury on theft and assault fees within the incident.
The DA’s workplace stated all the suspects are additionally homeless.
“Our subways must be safe for the millions of people who depend on public transportation,” Katz stated in her assertion. “The New York City subway system has been outfitted with cameras and the video recovered in this case is vital to our prosecution.”
The incident comes amid a current bounce in subway violence and is analogous to earlier situations when straphangers fought again towards transit thugs.
Most notable is the case of Daniel Penny, a Marine who was acquitted within the chokehold demise of vagrant Jordan Neely on a Manhattan F practice in 2023.
One other straphanger, Jordan Williams, fatally stabbed an aggressive homeless man who assaulted him and his companion on a Brooklyn J practice later that yr, however was cleared when a grand jury voted to not indict him on manslaughter and weapons fees.
Further reporting by Amanda Woods
