The attack happened yesterday as a 30-year-old woman was waiting for a subway train to take her to work at the Fifth Avenue-53rd Street station. At the same station a man later identified as Sabir Jones, age 39, was screaming obscenities. Another man, a student who was headed to the library, tried to walk away from Jones. He became the first victim.

He saw Mr. Jones screaming and was quickly walking away when Mr. Jones came up from behind, he said. Mr. Jones punched him in the left side of his face and fractured his jaw before fleeing, the man said.

The punching victim ran out of the station and said Thursday that he was in the hospital awaiting surgery.

The first victim didn’t see what happened next. Jones shoved the female victim into a train that was departing.

The victim hit her head on the departing downtown E train and then tumbled onto the roadbed at the Fifth Avenue/53rd Street station just after noon, according to the NYPD and police sources.

The suspect was mumbling to himself as he pushed her into the train, the sources said…

The young woman – who was either coming or going from work at the time of the attack – was taken to New York Presbyterian Hospital, where she was listed in critical condition, cops said.

She underwent surgery — where a significant portion of her skull was removed, according to Kemper and the sources.

She’s lucky to be alive. If people hadn’t been there to pull her off the tracks she probably wouldn’t be. As it is she is still listed in critical condition at the hospital.

Sabir Jones was identified from security video and his photo was shown via various media outlets. Today he was arrested after someone recognized him from those media images.

The suspect, Sabir Jones, was picked up in Newark on Thursday afternoon after he was spotted panhandling outside Penn Station Newark, near the PATH train.

A passerby recognized him from the media. He was taken to a local hospital for evaluation and is expected to be brought back to New York City later Thursday evening.

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that Jones is a homeless drug addict with mental problems.

Michael Kemper, the Police Department’s chief of transit, described Mr. Jones as an emotionally disturbed homeless man “known to the department” through a previous arrest and by his constant presence in subway stations…

Mr. Jones has a history of homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse, according to a person who was given access to some of his social service records.

Whenever something like this happens there are people who want to argue that crime on the subway is low and people shouldn’t be afraid. But as the NY Times admits, “the prospect of being shoved while on a platform is a perennial urban nightmare.” This sort of random crime is a kind of terrorism in the sense that it doesn’t take a lot of incidents for people to be afraid.

There was an eerily similar attack on a New York subway platform in May. In that incident Emine Yilmaz Ozsoy was shoved into a moving train by another 39-year-old homeless man named Kamal Semrade.

And before that a woman named Michelle Go was shoved onto the tracks in front of a moving train and killed in January 2022. Her attacker was, you guessed it, a schizophrenic homeless man named Martial Simon.

And that list doesn’t include the murder of Tommy Bailey, a father of two, on a subway train last October. Bailey was stabbed to death by Alvin Charles who at the time of the murder was on supervised released for stabbing another person on the subway a year earlier.

Some people attacked on the subways of New York have chosen not to become victims but you never know how the city’s prosecutors will react if you defend yourself.

Hopefully the city can manage to keep Sabir Jones off of subway platforms for a significant stretch of time.