OFF THE RAILS
Wild man stabs rider on train – NYers come to rescue
A bug-eyed madman went bloody berserk on a southbound C train in Manhattan Saturday morning, stabbing a passenger who refused to cough up any dough, police said. Tough-as-nails straphangers prevented further bloodshed by overpowering the mugger and holding him at bay until cops arrived.
Scrappy Manhattan straphangers showed a rampaging mugger who was boss Saturday morning, overpowering the violent ex-con even after he stabbed one of them three times in the gut.
It was just after 6 a.m. when Jamel Purnell, 39, decided to turn the southbound C train in Harlem into his own personal ATM machine, flashing a knife and demanding cash from a sleepy-eyed rider, police said.
“I was half-asleep and then I see a man with a knife sitting next to me,” said heroic rider Ricardo Zacarias, 28, a restaurant delivery man. “He turned to me and put his finger over his lips, saying, ‘Shhhh . . . Give me your money.’ ”
Zacarias forked over $6, telling him, “I don’t have any more money,” and Purnell snatched his cellphone, too, he recalled.
“I didn’t know what to do but run — so I got up and ran to the other end, where I saw two other [riders]. The man with the knife was following me.”
That’s when a second heroic rider, 61-year-old doorman Nicolas Direnzo tried to intervene — nearly paying with his life.
“The man with the knife stabbed the old guy three times,” Zacarias recalled, speaking in Spanish from his Harlem apartment. “It was so much blood.”
Direnzo underwent more than two hours surgery and suffered cuts to his organs, prosecutor Germaine Corprew told a Manhattan judge at Purnell’s arraignment early Sunday — in asking successfully that he be held without bail.
She called Direnzo, “a good Samaritan.”
Zacarias and fellow riders wouldn’t let Direnzo fight alone.
“I went back to help the old man,” Zacarias told The Post. “I started to punch and kick the man with the knife from behind — I did whatever I could.
“Someone had a metal rod and started hitting the man,” Zacarias remembered. The brave band bolted to another subway car, searching for the conductor — as the alleged knifeman stumbled after them.
“The conductor called the police, and said he was shutting the doors so the man with the knife couldn’t come into our car,” Zacarias said.
Then came the long ride to the next stop, as the C train was running express from 125th Street in Harlem to 59th Street at Columbus Circle due to rail work.
At 59th Street, Purnell “banged on the door, yelling ‘Let me out!’ as a ruse to get police away from him,” the prosecutor said in court.
“That’s him!” straphangers told waiting cops, as Purnell flung his knife away, the prosecutor said.
Neighbors were hardly surprised that Direnzo, an “oldschool Italian,” put up a fight.
“Knowing Nick, he would have probably been like, ‘Get the f--k out of my face’ or something,” said Edward Rodriguez, 29, Direnzo’s neighbor in Morningside Heights. “He [won’t] back down.”
Purnell was charged with robbery, assault, criminal possession of a weapon and menacing.
He has a criminal record dating back to 1995 for robbery, grand larceny, assault and trespass — more than 15 arrests, according to law-enforcement sources.