Man Pushed In Front Of Train Dies In Yet Another New York Subway Attack

A middle-aged man was killed after being pushed in front of a subway train following an altercation at the station in Queens, New York.

The incident occurred Monday evening after the victim got into a fight with the attacker at the Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue 74th Street station.

The accused, identified as a 50-year-old man, lost his temper when the victim, 48-year-old Heriberto Quintana bumped into him at the station during rush hour, NYPost reported. The impact caused the man's phone to slip out of his hand and fall on the tracks; he then asked Quintana to retrieve the device for him.

Tempers flared when the victim refused to oblige, leading to a fight, as per the outlet. The accused pushed Quintana in front of an oncoming Jamaica-bound F train, witnesses and police said.

"I heard a loud argument, an altercation. It was two Spanish guys — older, like in their 50s. You could hear them yelling on the mezzanine level. Then I heard screams and ran down to the platform," an MTA worker at the Jackson Heights station said.

He added that Quintana was alive and breathing in the immediate aftermath of the incident.

The suspect, a Spanish man, remains unidentified at the time of this writing. He escaped on another train despite other passengers trying to hold him down, the MTA worker said. The cops, however, were able to track the suspect down Monday night.

Quintana, meanwhile, was rushed to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.

According to recent reports, homicides in the New York City subway system have skyrocketed since 2020, despite a noticeable drop in passengers, the NYPost reported. Data shows that the past two years have seen a sharp spike in random violence in the last 25 years.

There hadn't been more than five murders on the subway annually. That number climbed to six in 2020 for the first time since 1997 and further increased to eight in 2021.

2022 has already seen seven fatal subway attacks so far. That's a total of 21 deaths since 2020, a number that's higher than the combined deaths recorded between 2008 and 2019.