Subway murder
Grandpa dies after punch sends him onto rails in Brooklyn
A MENTALLY ill teen off his meds and ranting about God, the devil and the constant battle between good and evil suckerpunched an innocent straphanger Wednesday, sending the victim tumbling from a Brooklyn subway platform onto the tracks.
Jacinto Suarez, 65, landed on the R line tracks at the Jay St./Metro Tech station at 2:35 p.m.
Suarez wasn’t hit by a train. And it wasn’t clear whether he climbed back up on the platform or if onlookers helped him. But the grandfather’s initial story of survival took a tragic turn as medics treated him.
He had a massive heart attack on the platform and died at Brooklyn Hospital.
“My dad don’t bother nobody,” the victim’s daughter, Tylenea Gonzalez, 34, told the Daily News. “My dad don’t bother nobody. I don’t know why anybody would do that to him. He went, he came home. I’m not gonna have him here anymore.”
Suarez had 10 children and 13 grandchildren.
“He’s a pain in the butt,” Gonzalez said of her dad from their Staten Island home, breaking down in tears. “But he’s a sweetheart. He helped me with my kids when I was working.”
Another one of Suarez’s daughters, who refused to give her name, was furious.
“What you gonna push an old man for?” she asked.
Suarez was on his way home from inquiring about his Social Security benefits when he was attacked.
“Whoever did whatever they did, I just want to get justice,” Gonzalez said. “That’s it.”
The subway horror sparked panic among dozens of straphangers who were on the platform.
“Everybody was screaming and we started to run,” said Jai Epperson, 22. “It could have been me.”
“In New York City it’s crazy,” he said. “I’m scared for my life.”
Edward Cordero, 18, was mumbling to himself when he walked up to Suarez, police said.
“He approached the 65-yearold man, and the male tells him to get away,” NYPD Assistant Chief Vincent Coogan told reporters. “The suspect walks away, then turned back and punched him.”
Coogan didn’t know how Suarez got back onto the platform but believed “good Samaritans helped him,” he said.
Shocked straphangers grabbed a cop at the station, who arrested Cordero.
The Brownsville teen’s family said he’d long terrorized them — and recently stopped taking medicine for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
“He was supposed to be on three different medications, but he’s run out and refuses to get more,” Cordero’s sister, Daribel Lugones, told The News in a tearfilled interview.
“He doesn’t go to school. He attacks members of our family.”
On Tuesday, Cordero cut Lugones with a Christmas ornament and slammed her cat, she said.
“He was here last night. He was screaming, ‘The devil is alive’ all night long,” she recalled at their mother’s apartment in the Ocean Hill Houses.
Police sources said Cordero was rambling about God, heaven and hell and good versus evil when he attacked Suarez.
“This wasn’t part of a robbery or anything,” a police source said.
“He just went off and the victim happened to be there.”
Cordero also goes by Andrew Cortez — a name he heard in a movie, Lugones, 23, said.
“He’s paranoid. He’s very secretive. He believes he’s somebody famous,” she explained.
Cops took Cordero to a transit police station for questioning. He was expected to be taken to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric exam, police said.
It wouldn’t be his first visit to the hospital.
“They had him in Bellevue, and they released him without our consent,” Lugones said.
Charges were pending against Cordero. If an autopsy determines that Suarez’s heart attack was caused by the assault, he could face a murder charge.
Cordero called his grandmother while in custody, insisted Suarez was the aggressor — and ranted more about the devil, Lugones said.
Witnesses saw Cordero try to grab something from the older man before he hit him.
“He was trying to take something from him, then he pushed him,” said Pauly JohnsonMedina, 21.
Cordero was arrested for a purse snatching in September, but Judge Rachel Freier ordered his release. Since then, the teen was arrested twice under his alias for turnstile jumping in Manhattan.
Trains on the R line bypassed Jay St. for hours as police investigated Suarez’s death.
On the same date 19 years ago, an eerily similar scene played out in Manhattan when Kendra Webdale was pushed to her death as she waited for an N train in Manhattan.
Her attacker, Andrew Goldstein, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was off his medication.
DJ Jaffe, the executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org. was involved with the creation of Kendra’s Law, which allows judges to order the mentally ill with violent backgrounds to get treatment.
“New York should enact ‘need for treatment’ and ‘grave disability’ commitment standards as most other states have done. And the state should declare a moratorium on closing psychiatric hospitals because there is no other place for patients to go,” Jaffe said.
For the Suarez and Cordero families, it is too late.
“I don’t know what to say to that poor man’s family. If it were our grandfather I’d be lost. I’m sorry for that man’s family. I can only send our condolences,” Lugones said.
“I hope they keep him in Bellevue,” she said of her younger brother. “That’s the end for him.”