Slashed MTA vet: I’m done!
The veteran MTA conductor whose neck was slashed when he stuck his head out of a train car in Brooklyn will never go back to work on the city’s subways after the gruesome random attack, he told The Post on Saturday.
Alton Scott said he’s too upset about the Thursday morning incident — that left him needing 34 stitches to his neck — to return to the system.
“I don’t see myself going back on that train, that’s not for me anymore,” the 59-year-old said.
“If I go back to work, I would not go on the train,” said Scott, who has worked in transit for 24 years.
“I’m too traumatized to do that. If I go back, they’ll have to find something else for me to do.”
The unprovoked incident happened at the Rockaway Avenue A/C station in BedfordStuyvesant around 4 a.m.
Scott said he hadn’t noticed anyone suspicious and had no idea he was about to be attacked while conducting an A train.
“All I heard was a hard thump on my neck,” he recalled. “I put my hand right on my neck and in a couple of seconds when I removed it, my hand was filled with blood.
“I kept my hand right there and that’s when I called over the PA. I said, ‘This is the conductor. I have been stabbed. I need help. I need help,’” he said.
A doctor on the train came to his aid and put pressure on the wound with a mask, he recalled.
“I thought I was going to die, period,” Scott said.
A short time later, he asked the doctor how he was and the doctor reassured him he was going to survive.
“The blade didn’t hit his artery,” he said. “That’s when I breathed a sigh of relief.”
He has since spoken to the doctor.
“I called him and I said, ‘Thank you so much,’” Scott recalled. “He said it’s OK. I said someday we will meet if possible.”
Scott wants the person who slashed him to be jailed for as long as possible. Police said there had been no arrest as of Saturday afternoon.
“When you catch somebody you have to give them seven years,” he said, noting the minimum advertised penalty for assaulting a train crew member. ”The law we got now at least apply them, make them work.”
But he said he’d like to see his attacker serve even more time.
“I’d like to see it stiffer,” he said. “So somebody knows they are not supposed to do this to anybody again or even think about doing it.”