Lucky to live
Knife vic tells how hate fiend just missed heart
LEIBY BRIKMAN was a few feet away from his Brooklyn apartment when he felt a sudden sharp pain in his back.
“I knew right away,” he recalled of the stabbing on Empire Blvd. near Kingston Ave. in Crown Heights on Feb. 10.
Brikman, 25, who was wearing a yarmulke, suffered a punctured lung.
The suspect, a black man wearing a blue hoodie, fled south on Albany Ave. toward Lefferts Blvd., according to surveillance video. A stunned Brikman tried to call Hatzolah, the Jewish volunteer ambulance service. But he struggled to find the number, so he stumbled into a check cashing store where several good Samaritans ran to help.
Cops have not declared it a hate crime, noting the suspect said nothing during the violence. Brikman was wearing Hasidic garb and was blocks away from away from the national headquarters of the Chabad Hasidic group.
“It’s definitely a hate crime,” Brikman told the Daily News on Wednesday. “The neighborhood represents world Jewry.”
The rabbinical scholar was mar- ried two weeks before the attack. On his way to the hospital, he made sure the EMTs called his wife and parents.
“I was shocked,” his wife Mushka recalled. “I just ran to the hospital.”
At Kings County Hospital, doctors inserted a chest tube and discovered the wound was a quarteruarter of an inch away from his heart. eart.
“I think God was watching us,” Brikman’s mother, er, Rivkah, said.
Still, the nightmare mare continued.
Two days after get- t- ting admitted to the hospital, Brikman suddenly became pale and started to suffer immense pain. Doctors rushed him to surgery.
During the operation, they found that a major blood vessel near his lung was cut by the blade, causing internal bleeding.bleedin They patched up the wound butbu not before he lost a liter and a half of blood.
Even Eventually, he was transferred t to New York University Hospita Hospital and finally allowed to
come home last weekend.