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The woman shoved onto subway tracks last week in Brooklyn revealed she narrowly cheated death thanks to two Good Samaritans — and sounded a dire warning about NYC’s safety crisis under Mayor Mamdani.
The 51-year-old was lying in bed and wearing a back brace because of a spinal injury as she recalled for The Post the heinous Valentine’s Day attack on her way to work around 8:45 a.m. at the 53rd Street and Fourth Avenue subway station in Sunset Park.
“I was facing death,” she said. “I called out for my mom but the only thing I could think about was my children. I didn’t want to leave them alone.”
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of her safety, was standing on the R line platform when repeat violent offender Curtis Signal came up behind her and allegedly pushed her to the tracks, cops said.
His only words to her were “Shut up,” she recalled.
She went flying about five feet down and slammed into the track bed, landing in pain on her back and stunned.
The brute also punched a 43-year-old woman who was waiting for the train.
A pair of good Samaritans helped her back on the platform with seconds to spare before a R train roared into the station, she said.
She is worried there will be others like her across Gotham.
“The system is failing,” she said, ripping the socialist mayor’s plan to use social workers to address crime involving the city’s legion of dangerously deranged.
“How is a social worker going to manage this guy?” she asked, referring to the Department of Community Safety Mamdani hopes to create.
“He was a big guy who hit me with so much force,” added the victim.
The attack left her with three broken ribs and two compressed vertebrae.
“The doctor said the spinal injury was too close to my heart and it was too risky to operate,” she recalled.
“I’m going to have this injury the rest of my life.”
She has been unable to return to her job as a home health aide.
“When I walk, it’s very slow and when I move I’m in so much pain,” she said.
She’s barely slept since the attack and is struggling with depression.
“Why did this happen to me? I’m not a bad person,” she said.
A friend, who lives in the same building, and her daughter are helping her, but she doesn’t know how she’ll survive without working.
“It’s very difficult to make ends meet,” said the woman, a mother-of-three and grandmother-of-four, who moved to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic.
Her daughter, who rushed from the Dominican Republic to be by her side, was panicked when she heard what happened.
“I thought I was going to lose my mom,” the young woman said.
Signal, who was busted at a homeless shelter a short time after the attack, has a history of violence in the subway and is on probation until June 2027.
On Sept. 3, 2023, he allegedly punched a 67-year-old woman as she waited for an F train at 169th Street, in Jamaica, Queens, prosecutors and sources said. He wasn’t charged with the assult until May 4, 2024, when he was picked up for turnstile jumping.
“The experience was so traumatic I can’t talk about it,” the victim from that attack told The Post after learning he was charged with hurting other women in the subway.
Signal spent three months in jail and then pleaded guilty to felony attempted assault and misdemeanor assault. As part of the plea, he had to enroll in an inpatient treatment program and stay out of trouble, according to a spokeswoman for the Queens District Attorney’s Office.
After the program, he was sentenced in June to two years of probation.
If he had not completed the program, he would have been sentenced to one to three years in prison on the felony, she said.
Just three days after assaulting the woman, Signal was arrested on Sept. 7, 2023, for punching a cop and breaking his nose in a Bronx subway station, according to a criminal complaint. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in Rikers Island, a Bronx District Attorney’s Office spokesman said.
In 2022, he allegedly beat a 31-year-old woman on a Queens street, and the same year, struck his 13-year-old sister, leaving her with a black eye.
He was sentenced to time served for the beating, a court spokeswoman said. The outcome of the case with his relative was not public because of its domestic nature.
Signal’s defense attorney, Jack Brewer, argued at Signal’s arraignment Feb. 15 that “there is more to Signal,” and that he graduated from Queens Academy High School. A judge ordered him held without bail on Rikers Island.
The victim said the city’s woke criminal justice system is also to blame.
“This is going to happen again and again and maybe worse,” she said.
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