PIPE-BASH FOR LACK OF CASH
Subway victim’s horror
A subway panhandler bashed a Manhattan straphanger in the head with a metal pipe — all because he wouldn’t cough up any cash, the victim said Monday.
“I didn’t have no money to give him,” Michael Vansluytman, a 59-year-old MTA worker from The Bronx, said from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from a fractured skull and eye socket and two black eyes.
The man said the horrifying attack, which was caught on videotape, occurred as he was headed to his sister’s house in Brooklyn on a southbound No. 2 train around 11 p.m. Saturday.
Vansluytman said a “crazy” panhandler, identified by cops as homeless 35year-old Geovannie Nieves, asked him for money. The straphanger said that when he told Nieves he didn’t have any to give him, the suspect became enraged.
“He was up in my face, so I said, ‘Please get out of my face.’ He said I’m disrespectful,’’ Vansluytman said.
Nieves then spoke to Vansluytman, who is a native of Guyana, in Spanish. The argument escalated when Vansluytman said he doesn’t speak Spanish, and Nieves allegedly used the metal rod he was holding to take a swing at Vansluytman’s head.
“Before I could get up and block, he hit me with this iron,” said Vansluytman, who spoke to The Post by phone from Bellevue Hospital.
Nieves was busted Monday at the Brooklyn shelter where he lives after someone called in a tip to Crime Stoppers, authorities said.
He was nabbed in the same “Everlast Sport” cutoff T-shirt and black hat that he was seen wearing in video of the attack.
Nieves — who has two prior arrests, for burglary in February and aggravated harassment in 2013 — was charged with felony assault with a weapon.
He told reporters as he was being escorted from the Manhattan Robbery Squad to his arraignment that he is “sorry” but “don’t remember nothing that happened” — except that the argument wasn’t over money.