FILE (Photo by Ron Adar / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)
New York Police Transit Bureau Assistant Chief Vincent Coogan Holds News Conference in New York, US – 25 Oct 2021
NEW YORK (77WABC) — A young woman told ABC 7 about her harrowing experience getting randomly attacked on the subway.
22-year-old Vesly Beato and her 15-year-old cousin were on the uptown 1 train heading home to Inwood, where she was slapped hard in the face by man as the train pulled into the West 66th Street subway station by Lincoln Center. She was wearing glasses which cut into the bridge of her nose.
“I was looking down and the next thing I know, I heard a slap,” Beato said. “I didn’t even feel the slap. I heard it first. When I look up everybody is staring at me. I look at my cousin, she’s crying.”
“That’s when it sunk in, this man just hit me,” she added.
She posted a video detailing her attack on TikTok, where more than 8,000 comments, many of them from women, described how they too have been pushed, slashed, punched and attacked.
So far this year, there have been 1,488 reported transit crimes. That’s compared to 998 reported at this time last year — a jump of 490 incidents.
