Dramatic video footage captured the moment a 69-year-old homeless man stabbed the thugs who mercilessly terrorized him on a Queens subway train, killing one and wounding another.
In an unusual twist of transit justice, the surviving goons are now behind bars, according to prosecutors.
“The victim was accosted without provocation, and our investigation has revealed that he defended himself while attempting to retrieve his property,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement on Wednesday.
“As a result, my office will not be filing charges for the fatality.”
Gripping video of the violent encounter on a 7 train on December 22 shows the victim sleeping on the train shortly before 12:30 a.m., when two of the brutes — identified by prosecutors as Stalin Moya and Oswaldo Walter — grab one of the man’s bags and take it into a second car.
Moya then returns to grab more of the victim’s bags, waking him up in the process.
That’s when things got violent.
The unidentified victim followed Moya into the second car to retrieve his belongings, only to be attacked and beaten by several men in the group as they dispersed and hid his bags.
The victim is then shoved and slugged repeatedly by the group, until he has had enough and pulls out a long knife to slash his attackers, injuring at least two.
The cowardly thugs then scatter, with one stumbling away, bleeding from his wounds, while the victim remains in the middle of the empty subway car, clutching the knife.
Queens prosecutors said Moya was killed and defendant Phillipe Pena was injured.
A grand jury indicted Pena, 26, Walter, 29, and two others — Jose Valencia, 35, and Henry Toapanta, 32 — on robbery and assault charges in connection with the incident.
The DA’s office stated that all of the suspects are also homeless.
“Our subways must be safe for the millions of people who rely on public transportation,” Katz said in the statement. “The New York City subway system has been outfitted with cameras and the video recovered in this case is vital to our prosecution.”
The incident occurred during a recent surge in subway violence and bears similarities to previous instances in which straphangers fought back against transit thugs.
The most notable case is that of Daniel Penny, a Marine who was acquitted of the chokehold death of vagrant Jordan Neely on a Manhattan F train in 2023.
Jordan Williams, another straphanger, fatally stabbed an aggressive homeless man who assaulted him and his companion on a Brooklyn J train later that year, but was acquitted when a grand jury declined to indict him on manslaughter and weapons charges.
