Attacker attacks New York subway with beer bottle, leaves kitchen worker with stitches, warns 'it's no longer safe'

Metro

by Joe Marino, Jorge Fitz-Gibbon and amanda woods

A kitchen worker received six stitches after being hit in the face with a beer bottle by an unknown man during a midtown subway attack Wednesday. The victim had warned that he was “not safe anymore”.

Police said Rafael Galvez Garcia, 44, was standing on the northbound A and C train platforms at Columbus Circle around 10:10 p.m. when a deranged man approached him and handed him a dollar. demanded.

“The man came up to me and asked for money,” Garcia told The Post in Spanish Thursday afternoon. “I told him, 'No, I don't have any money.' I thought he was going to leave, but he came back and asked me the same thing.”

The stranger then grabbed the plastic bag Garcia was holding and tried to rip it off.

“All I had in my bag was a plastic bottle and some chips,” Garcia said. “He grabbed it from my hand, I tried to take it from him, and at that moment he hit me with a glass bottle.”

Police said the impact left Garcia with a cut on his forehead and a small amount of bleeding.

He was taken to Mount Sinai West where he was listed in stable condition but required six stitches to close the wound.

“I never expected something like this to happen,” Garcia said. “People who beg for money don't do that. That's not normal.”

The gunman fled but was not captured by Thursday.

Garcia said he will keep a close eye on the attacker and is prepared to call 911 to prevent another attack.

“If I see him again, I'm going to call the police. There's no way someone like that would do something like that on the subway,” Garcia said. “There are people with children. Imagine if he did the same thing to someone with children.”

“Now I have to think about it, because something like this could happen at any time. It's not safe anymore.”

The crime is the latest in a series of troubling incidents in the city's underground, where an unhinged assailant with a long history of mental illness randomly assaulted another man in front of an East Harlem train. The incident occurred days after he was stabbed to death, authorities said.