An MTA train conductor was grateful Thursday for a doctor who stopped the bleeding from his neck after he was randomly attacked by a stranger who slashed him at a Brooklyn subway stop.
“A doctor saved my life…. That’s the reason why I’m safe right now,” Alton Scott, 59, said as he recovered at home from the early-morning slash attack at the Rockaway Ave. station in Bedford-Stuyvesant — a crime that led the main transit workers’ union to demand better protection for subway workers and passengers.
Scott was cut when he poked his head out of the conductor’s cab of the Far Rockaway-bound A train around 3:30 a.m.. Under MTA rules, when a train arrives at a station, conductors announce the train’s stop and then stick their heads out of their cabs’ windows to make sure it’s safe for the train to depart.
“I was doing my job,” Scott told the Daily News as he recovered in his Brooklyn home. “As per rule — make the announcement, put my head out.”
The attacker said nothing when he approached Scott and slashed his neck.
Bleeding from the gnarly wound, Scott called for help over the train’s public address system. “I said, ‘I just got stabbed! I need help right away!’ and he came to my aid,” Scott said of the doctor. “He was an angel.”
The doctor was among several commuters who offered to help Scott. As someone called police, the doctor held Scott’s face mask on the wound to stanch the bleeding. The doctor, who Scott referred to as “Dr. Patrick,” stayed with him until EMS arrived.
Scott was rushed to Brookdale University Hospital, where he needed 34 stitches and nine sutures to close up the gaping wound.
NYC Transit’s Senior Vice President of Subways, Demetrius Crichlow, raced to the hospital Thursday morning after hearing about the attack. “His first words to me were, ‘I love my job, but I thought I was going to die,'” Crichlow said.
A union official recounted that while Scott was being treated, he kept repeating the words: “Man, I was just doing my job.”
“This is a cowardly act,” Crichlow said. “There’s no employee that should have to deal with this. There is no circumstance where an employee who is just doing his job should have to deal with this. Our job is to provide a service to New York. And it’s disgusting that anyone would have to deal with coming in and being in danger.”
Scott was released from the hospital later Thursday. “I’m not doing so good,” Scott told The News at his home. “I’m going by my doctor’s orders and trying to get rest.”
Scott’s attacker, who wore a blue vest, fled the scene. Police were still looking for the suspect late Thursday. MTA officials said the cameras in the station were working, but police said detectives were having a difficult time obtaining surveillance pictures of the suspect.
Scott, a 24-year MTA employee, and his union, Transport Workers Union Local 100, used the incident to call for more anti-crime measures on subways and buses.
“Everything needs to change in my opinion,” Scott said. “I don’t blame nobody for what happened to me — I’m not that type of person. I don’t know why it happened, but I’m just glad to be alive.”
The cut was “too close to his carotid artery,” TWU Local 100 Union President Richard Davis said. If the stranger’s blade nicked the artery, Scott would have bled to death in seconds, union officials said.
“This kind of assault is attempted murder — it’s nothing else but that,” Davis said at a press conference outside the station. “Our members do not deserve that. We come here to feed our families.”
Davis asked that the MTA’s 1,000-member police force — currently assigned to the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro North Railroad — be deployed to supplement the NYPD’s Transit Bureau to protect train conductors and other subway system employees.
“We’re facing heinous crimes and brutal assaults. Enough is enough,” he said. “The law is clear: our safety is in the hands of our employer. But we need better protection now, before we lose one of our own.”
Train crews’ safety concerns led to severe delays on the A and C lines Thursday morning.
New York City Transit President Rich Davey said an “unacceptable” union work stoppage slowed A and C train service after the incident.
The union denied there was a work stoppage, and said the slowdown occurred because crews requested safety assurances from management before taking to the rails while the slashing suspect was still at large.
Service was severely delayed on the A and C lines through the morning, and the MTA issued alerts saying it was “running as much service as we can with the train crews we have available.” Service on the lines returned to normal around noon.
The MTA is in the process of adding surveillance cameras to the more than 6,000 subway cars in its fleet. One of those cameras recently caught a man being shot to death on a Bronx D train.
But cameras have not been placed in conductor cabs. Local 100 has long fought the installation of cameras in the cabs on privacy grounds.
Davey said he decided Thursday to order cameras to be installed in the cabs despite the union’s objections.
“We’re doing it right now, to protect conductors,” added MTA Chairman Janno Lieber.
Additionally, a pilot program at the 125th St. station on the No. 4, 5 and 6 trains marks off no-standing zones outside of the conductor’s cab.
“It’s not going to prevent a person from getting in there,” Crichlow said of the no-standing zones. “But what it does do is raise awareness for the conductor that someone is standing close to the area where he would need to open the window.”
The slashing comes as the NYPD tackles a 13% jump in crime in the city’s subway system, including an 11% increase in assaults.
As of Sunday, NYPD transit cops have investigated 86 assaults in the city’s subways compared to 77 by this time last year.
There have also been three homicides in the first two months of the year on the city’s rails — compared to zero by this point last year.
The NYPD has added another 1,000 cops to the city’s transit system in light of the uptick in violence, officials announced earlier this week.
Ramirez said reported assaults and harassment of transit workers has risen to more than a dozen incidents per month this year, up from about seven in 2019.
Earlier this month, a station agent was assaulted by a man who was sleeping at the Wall St. station of the No. 4 and 5 trains after she’d woken him up.
A bus driver in lower Manhattan was also attacked with a knife this month by a man who thought the bus was traveling too slowly.
Earlier this week, Davey told the MTA board that there have been “at least seven” instances of assaults on transit workers so far this year, a number that didn’t include Thursday’s slashing.
MTA Chairman Lieber called Thursday’s attack “outrageous.”
The 38 people accused of assaulting MTA workers in 2023 “between them had something like 600 priors,” Lieber said. “How can those people be out here?”
“People have got to be able to come to work and serve the public — these are public servants — and know that they are going to come home to their families,” Lieber said.
