An elderly good Samaritan was beaten and stabbed on board an MTA bus when he confronted a bully for pushing past a pregnant passenger – saying he felt compelled to step in because “there’s no respect for women on the bus.”
Robert Hunter, 73, was on his way back from grocery shopping in Harlem around 6:30 p.m. June 5 when he said four brutes attacked him as the bus reached Broadway and West 92nd Street on the Upper West Side – all because he defended the woman.
“It was a pregnant girl on the bus, she… had a baby carriage, and she didn’t want to sit down,” Hunter told The Post by phone Thursday. “She’s letting everybody else sit down. So a guy got on the bus and pushed by her, squeezing by, hitting the lady’s stomach, you know?”
“So all I said was, ‘You know the lady’s pregnant, show her some respect,’” Hunter recalled.
But the intervention only made Hunter the new target of the pusher and his three buddies on board the M104, he said.
“Mind your f–king business,” the brutes told him, according to law enforcement sources.
“[Another] guy came out from the back out of nowhere,” Hunter said. “You know, he said something to me, one thing led to another, [and] we wind up scrapping it [out] on the bus.”
“One hit me from behind,” he added. “I thought it was one, but it was three on me from behind and the bus driver’s saying ‘It’s four guys on you.’”
The suspects punched Hunter in the head and body before brandishing a knife and stabbing him in the left shoulder, cops said.
He was taken by EMS to Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, where he was listed in stable condition.
“They took me in ‘cause my arm was full of blood,” the septuagenarian said. “I didn’t feel it, feel the blood, you know.”
“But I’m all right, I ain’t got no black eye,” he added. “He just stabbed me in the shoulder with something, took three stitches, so you know, it wasn’t that serious.”
Meanwhile, Hunter said his family and friends have urged him to avoid the bus after the attack.
“They’re like, ‘Take your car from now on,’ ‘We can’t afford to let nothing happen to you,’ and this and that,” he said.
But Hunter said he knows that what he did was right, even though he took a beating for it.
“I try to look out ‘cause if that was my daughter… [if] she was pregnant and someone was pushing her around, and you know, there’s no respect for women on the bus,” he said.
The NYPD released photos late Wednesday of two backpack-wearing brutes wanted in connection with the attack.
Anyone with information on the assault is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782).
The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website at https://crimestoppers.nypdonline.org/, on X @NYPDTips.
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