KILLED BY RAIL DRUNK
A BELOVED college student described as his mother’s miracle child was killed by a train in Brooklyn after he fell to the tracks while defending himself against a boozed-up straphanger, cops and family said Saturday.
The horrific death of Joshua Basin, 20, came just a week after he posted a picture on Facebook of himself and friends posing next to a moving subway car.
“It looks like I almost got hit by the train,” Basin joked on his Facebook wall of the March 16 picture.
The tragic irony unfolded Friday night as Basin was riding out of the city with two friends on an eastbound L train when a drunken man began berating several riders in the car, cop sources said.
“For some reason, he singles (Basin) out,” a police source said. “(The suspect) began arguing with him.”
The train pulled into the Bedford Ave. station in Williamsburg and the dispute spilled onto the platform about 10 p.m., cops said.
Suddenly, the man attacked Basin and the pair tumbled to the tracks on the other side of the platform — just as a Manhattan-bound train was rolling into the station.
The assailant — described as a white man in his early 30s — climbed back onto the platform m and ran away. But Basin, a student at Laguardia a Community College, was crushed by the train before he could pull himself out of the track bed, cops and family said.
“He ran away,” weeping mom Zena Basin said of the suspect. “He left my son dead.”
A rescue team arrived within minutes inutes and rushed Basin to Bellevue Hospital, but he could not be saved.
His devastated mother clutched a picture of her only child at the family’s Howard Beach, Queens, home as tears welled in her eyes.
“My only son,” she said. “I need needd to find fifind out why anyone would do this to my loving son.”
She said Joshua was born a twin, but the other child did not survive.
“He was my miracle child,” she said. “He wasn’t even supposed to be born.”
Basin, an aspiring actor who loved music and art, often wrote poems as gifts.
She said her only child was s studying to become a psycholo ogist.
“He was such a brilliant stud dent,” said one friend, Tamer.
“He always pushed himself t to do better. . . . No one des serves to die like that. It’s horrib ble — just horrible.”
In one poem, Basin railed a against the Iraq war.
“Another good soldier d dead,” it read. “It was for A America so they said, a country built upon war and violence.”
Detectives were poring over surveillance footage from inside and outside the subway station for images of the suspect, who was wearing a black fleece and brown pants.
Basin’s two friends, who were not identified, were trying to help investigators spot the brute in the videos, sources said.
Basin’s mother said she hopes someone will step up and find her child’s killer. “I need justice,” she said. “Whoever did this is a coward.” [He] did this and didn’t help him. . . . I need to find out why he did that to my son.” With Pete Donohue,
Ben Chapman and Mark Morales