It’ll take more than a knife fight to slow this New Yorker’s commute.
A 21-year-old Staten Islander took a knife to the stomach during a fight in a Manhattan subway car early Saturday morning. But this ride-or-die commuter wasn’t about to miss his transfer over something trivial like a stab wound. Despite the fresh puncture wound in his abdomen, the unidentified young man got off his train and hopped a ferry to Staten Island, where he finally allowed authorities to take him to the hospital.
The stabbing victim and his attacker got into an argument on a downtown-bound N Train near Manhattan’s South Ferry station around 3:52 a.m. on Saturday, police say. Just minutes later, the stabbing victim had left the subway station, transferred to the nearby Staten Island Ferry terminal, and departed on the 4 a.m. ferry.
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The ambitious connection would have required the victim to climb multiple staircases, change platforms, and rush across the ferry terminal while bleeding from his torso.
The attacker was also in his early 20s, police say. They describe the suspect as 5-foot-9, roughly 160 pounds with brown eyes and black hair, wearing black jeans, a red hoodie, black hat, and white sneakers.
Conventional wisdom would suggest calling police before boarding a boat to another island. But frequent Staten Island ferry passengers might sympathize with the victim’s priorities. Ferries run every half-hour, an interval that feels considerably longer at 4 a.m. on a Saturday, surrounded by intoxicated commuters and lingering fast food odors from the terminal's shuttered food court. The experience would likely be worse while nursing a knife wound.
Fortunately for the victim, help was waiting on the other side of the Upper New York Bay. Paramedics arrived on the scene at Staten Island’s St. George Ferry Terminal and rushed the man to nearby Richmond University Medical Center, where he received stitches for what police describe as a non life-threatening injury.
Between the terminal transfer, the 25-minute ferry ride and a short trip in an ambulance, he would have arrived at the hospital some 40 minutes after the attack.
The Saturday morning knife attack is the latest in a wave of slashings and stabbings to occur on New York City subways since the end of 2015. In November, a man slashed two strangers in the face with a razor without warning while riding a C Train in Brooklyn. December saw one man stabbed in the buttocks on an F train, while January saw at least five attacks on public transit, conducted variously by boxcutters, knives, and a machete.
The trend has sent subway crime shooting up 20 percent in 2016, driven in large part by felony assaults, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told press in a Monday meeting.
Police have yet to make any arrests in the Saturday subway stabbing. The victim, however, is in stable—albeit stationary—condition.
