NYC Metro director Jean Joseph put his head out of the train window to check whether all passengers were safe on board when a disturbed stranger hit him in the face and broke his teeth.
After the random attack on the W -train last week at the Ditmars Boulevard Station in Astoria, he did not return to work.
“He muttered something about me that closed the doors,” said Joseph of his attacker, who was wearing a white underrod.
The MTA employee, 33, who originally comes from Haiti and is about to become a new father, speculates that the man was angry, he missed the train.
He is still traumatized.
“I had a nightmare: I stuck my head out of the window, but it was not a person who hit me. It was a train,” he told the post.
When the breakthrough attacker heard the call from the conductor to come on the radio of the supervisor, he left the stairs and out of the station, said Joseph.
“I think it is confused,” Joseph said about the attack of 2 May, and noted that another train conductor with whom he works was also recently hit. “We are actually trying to do our work and something like that just happens.”
His fiancé immediately thought of an incident in March 2024 in Brooklyn, in which a conductor was cut into the neck while he put his head out of the train window.
“My baby mother continues to think of the other conductor who was cut in the neck,” he said. “She’s afraid of me too.”
Joseph was to the Mt. Sinai Hospital brought for a sliced lip and two cracked teeth.
He is not sure when he will go back to work.
“I’m afraid to put my head out of the window now,” he said. “It is part of our procedure. Sometimes people’s clothing or bag handles can get stuck in the doors, so we observe for their safety.”
The police have released a searched poster from the attacker, but there have been no arrests.
The attack in the city’s metro system has so far rose by 13%to 208 this year from 184 in the same time frame in 2024, according to police data. Large transit crime – including murder – will continue to fall 7.8% from 709 to 654, the police said.
There have so far 11 attacks on MTA employees, according to NYPD data so far this year, two less than the 13 on this point in 2024.
Assault on MTA employees reached a peak of 22 in 2022, showed the data.
