NEW YORK, NY- Manhattan’s soft-on-crime policies claimed another victim when a lunatic who spent a grand total of one hour in a psych ward before he was released pushed a retired teacher down a flight of stairs to his death.
Only a month before, the crazed suspect attacked two women on a subway. One of the women related her story to The New York Post.
The victim told The Post that she and a friend were on a subway in Manhattan on April 2 when the crazed suspect, Rhamell Burke, approached them and began a conversation.
They quickly realized the man they were dealing with wasn’t in his right mind, and tried to switch cars to get away from him.
Burke continued following them and attacked her by yanking the back of her head, and attempted to slam her to the ground. He kicked her friend in the back.
“He comes back and kicks my friend in the back, and basically pushes him through the transition of the cars,” the woman told The Post in a phone interview last week.
“My friend freaks out, runs away, and then he grabs me by the head and pushes my head down, trying to, like, maybe throw me on the ground or something. But I didn’t, I resisted as much as I could. I didn’t fall, and then I immediately opened up the car and then ran towards my friend.”
She said the train “luckily” stopped at the West 4th Street-Washington Square Station in Greenwich Village, which allowed them to escape.
Undeterred, Burke kept following them.
“We get off at West 4th Street, and then we turn around, and we see he’s following us. That’s when I was like: ‘Oh, like, this is scary. Like, why is he following us?’” the woman recalled, referring to Burke as a “buff guy.”
“We started running a little bit, but then thank God the cops were right there because, I mean, we kept thinking about, imagine that there were no cops, we would have had to literally run for our lives. They immediately arrested him. It was shut down really fast by the cops, and we respected that.”
She told The Post that the attack left her and her friend “in shock,” but they refused to cooperate with prosecutors, which she said she now regrets after Burke was charged with murder last week after pushing retired teacher Ross Falzone, 76, to his death at a Chelsea subway station last week.
Police had taken Burke to Bellevue Hospital on Thursday afternoon for “acting erratically” before he was released about an hour later and attacked Falzone later that night.
“I regret it 100%, and I actually feel really bad that a man lost his life,” she told The Post.
“Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail, but, you know, at some point, if you are a criminal, you’re a criminal, and he was scary, he was a scary guy.”
After the April attack, Burke was charged with assault and granted supervised release at his arraignment.
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