A 43-year-old woman was punched in the face and robbed of her cell phone inside a Manhattan subway station on her way to work during the morning rush Thursday, cops said.
The victim – a Woodside, Queens resident who was heading to her job at an Upper East Side hospital – said she was waiting for an uptown Q train at the East 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue station around 7:30 a.m. when a stranger attacked her on the nearly empty platform.
“I want to make sure that this person gets caught,” the woman, who did not want to be identified, told The Post in a phone interview Thursday afternoon.
“I just don’t want to have any more victims on the subway,” she said.
Another train had just left and “there wasn’t anyone on the platform” as the woman was waiting for the Q to arrive, she recalled.
She was checking when the next train arrival was when she saw a woman coming in her direction.
“I thought she was just like passing by, and then as she was coming closer, she was like, coming towards my direction,” the victim said. “And then as soon as I noticed that she was close to me — she raised her arm [as if] she was trying to punch me.”
The quick-thinking woman tried her best to dodge the blow, she said.
“She did hit my face. But because I was able to back up a little bit, I wasn’t like, like, very hurt,” the victim said.
“After she punched me, she was cursing at me. She said, ‘You don’t think I know what you did.’ And like she was just saying some nonsense.”
The blow caused the woman to drop her phone on the ground – and the suspect grabbed it, she said.
The victim then ran upstairs to ask on-duty MTA employees for help. She refused medical attention at the scene for injuries to her head.
Hours later, she told The Post she is physically OK – but struggling “psychologically” in the aftermath of the mugging.
She said she plans to stay away from that train station during future commutes – even though it’s part of her everyday routine.
“This is the route that I take every day to go to work, but from now on, I think I might take an alternative route,” she said. “It may take longer, but I probably will not go to that station again.”
“It’s very stressful,” she added. “The fact that I have to go to work, I have to think about, like, which way I have to go, [and] I would always be more cautious about taking the trains, and also at the stations, like, ‘Who’s around me?’”
Before the attack, the victim said she would have never pegged someone like the woman who attacked her as a threat.
“I mean, if you look at her, you would think she’s just a normal, like an ordinary commuter,” the woman recalled. “She did not appear to be homeless. Her clothes were clean and everything. She had make-up on, so you would never imagine.”
She said she’s grateful for the MTA workers who helped her – and that she thinks it’s important to increase their presence, as well as that of NYPD officers, inside subway stations.
“If they weren’t around, I don’t know where I would be,” she said. “I wouldn’t know where to get help.”
The mugger, believed to be in her 50s, fled the scene and was still on the loose by later Thursday, cops and sources said.
While she wasn’t seriously injured, the victim said that, “We don’t know what’s going to happen next … potentially this person can do something worse.”
“So that’s just my major concern.”