Booze-bottle bash on rails
A STRAPHANGER cracked open a bottle of booze on a Brooklyn train and then cracked another passenger over the head with it during a heated clash that included an anti-Mexican rant.
Police and the victim shared the harrowing details on Saturday — another transit beatdown in the big city.
The drunken attacker, still being sought late Saturday for assault, got into an argument with 33-year-old Jesus Gomez Cortez on a 2 train about 11 p.m. on Nov. 8, cops said.
When Cortez got off the train at the Newkirk Ave. station in Flatbush, the suspect crept up behind him and cracked the bottle over his head, then ran off.
Cortez said he was on his way home from work when the sloshed man started yelling at him for taking a video of him in his inebriated condition. The man claimed he was going to call immigration on him for being Mexican, Cortez recalled.
“He was yelling at everybody,” said Cortez, who works at a Manhattan restaurant. “I wasn’t listening to him. Then he came straight to me and started saying, ‘You’re Mexican! You’re an immigrant.’ I said, ‘Yes I am, but what’s the problem?’”
Things got so heated that Cortez punched him in the face, he said.
“I told him I didn’t want any problems,” Cortez said. “The people on the subway were telling me, ‘Leave him alone! Leave him alone!’ So I left him.”
A few moments later the man shattered the bottle over Cortez’s head. Cortez wasn’t seriously hurt and refused medical attention.
Police released the video Saturday and asked the public’s help identifying the bottle-wielding perp.
Cops described the suspect as Hispan- ic, between 30 and 40 years old with black hair. He was sporting headphones and wearing a red sweatshirt and black sweatpants.
The attack comes as police combat a nearly 5% jump in assaults in the transit system. Through Nov. 12, 277 assaults had been reported — 12 more than the 265 reported during the same time period in 2016.
On Thursday — more than a week after Cortez’s attack — a manspreading maniac punched a 37-year-old woman on a morning rush-hour train in Brooklyn after she asked him to give her some room, cops said. Police arrested a suspect on Saturday.
That same night, a Bronx commuter punched a 29-year-old mother of two on a Manhattan-bound No. 6 train, but was pulled off the train by a group of onlookers who punched and kicked the assailant into submission.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with people,” Cortez said, referring to the recent attacks on the rails. “Crazy things happen on the subways.”
Police ask anyone with information about Cortez’s attacker to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS.