‘HE NEEDS TO DIE’
Stabbed preg gal slams suspect
The pregnant woman who was stabbed on a Bronx subway train recalled from her hospital bed Friday how she and her friend were suddenly attacked — because her leg brushed up against a crazed straphanger.
“I thought he was crazy — he gave me a look,” said Shaday Tripp, 24, who is five months’ pregnant. “He almost killed me.”
Tripp was headed to The Bronx after a prenatal doctor’s appointment on Staten Island with her friend Zakia Lewis, 21, at around 6:40 p.m. Thursday.
She sat down on her pal’s lap because there were no seats left on the northbound 2 train, and her leg accidentally touched Derrick Wilson, a 50-year-old street poet and author.
“My leg bumped into him by accident,” Tripp said. “He was getting mad, saying, ‘She bumped my leg!’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then he just started cursing.”
Wilson flew into a rage — and pulled a knife from the pocket of his suit coat, Tripp said. “He had on, like, a work suit. It was, like, in his pocket. It was covered with a rag or something,” Tripp said of the weapon.
“He just stabbed me in the neck. And I was running around on the train to try to get off. And then he stabbed [Lewis] in the arm twice.”
Other passengers helped Tripp apply pressure to her wound and get off at the next stop. “They helped me cover my neck,” she said. “They put something on my neck and told me to stay un- til the ambulance came.”
She is expected to recover, cops said. Her unborn baby was not injured.
Tripp, who said she is temporarily homeless and had been staying at a shelter in The Bronx, was still seething over the attack Friday.
“I feel that he needs to die,” she fumed. “He almost killed me. It hurts.”
Wilson’s cousin, Tynisha Poole, insisted, “This isn’t him . . . This was probably in self-defense.”
His mother, who did not give her name, said, “This is crazy,’’ adding she “didn’t agree’’ with anything that happened at Wilson’s court arraignment.
Wilson, who hawks his books on the rails, has been arrested 16 times since 1989. He’s been charged with assault three times since May 2013. He was held in lieu of $100,000 cash bail or a $200,000 bond.