The moment a 69-year-old homeless man attacked the thugs who brutally harassed him on a Queens subway train, killing one and wounded another, was caught on dramatic video.
Prosecutors claim that the remaining guys are now in jail in an odd twist of transportation justice.
“Our investigation has shown that the victim defended himself while trying to recover his property after being accosted without provocation,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement on Wednesday.
Therefore, my office will not be prosecuting the death.
The victim is seen sleeping on the train just before 12:30 a.m. on the footage of the violent encounter on a 7 train on December 22. At that time, two of the brutes, who were identified by the prosecution as Stalin Moya and Oswaldo Walter, seize one of the man’s bags and carry it into a second car.
After that, Moya wakes the victim up by going back to get more of his bags.
Things were violent at that point.
Several males in the gang attacked and thrashed the unnamed victim as they scattered and concealed his bags after he followed Moya into the second car to get his possessions.
The group then repeatedly slugs and shoves the victim until he loses it and slashes his assailants with a long knife, wounding at least two.
The victim stays in the center of the deserted subway car, holding the knife, as the cowardly thugs disperse, one of them staggering away, bleeding from his wounds.
According to Queens prosecutors, Phillipe Pena, the defendant, was hurt and Moya was killed.
Pena, 26, Walter, 29, and two other people, Jose Valencia, 35, and Henry Toapanta, 32, were indicted by a grand jury on charges of robbery and assault in relation to the event.
All of the accused are homeless, according to the DA’s office.
Katz stated in the statement that the millions of people who depend on public transit must feel safe using our subways. Cameras have been installed throughout the New York City subway system, and the footage retrieved in this case is essential to our legal defense.
Similar to other incidents where straphangers retaliated against transport criminals, the incident took place during a recent spike in subway violence.
The most well-known case involves Daniel Penny, a Marine who was found not guilty of killing vagrant Jordan Neely by strangulation on a Manhattan F train in 2023.
Another straphanger, Jordan Williams, was acquitted when a grand jury refused to indict him on charges of homicide and weapons. Later that year, he fatally killed an angry homeless man who attacked him and his partner on a Brooklyn J train.
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