http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_c...int=1&page=allWoman fatally knifes thug in subway attack, then flees on F train
BY Kerry Burke and John Lauinger
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Friday, December 25th 2009, 1:33 AM
Several thugs tried to drag a woman off a Queens subway train Thursday night, but she fought back and fatally stabbed one of her tormenters before fleeing on another train, police said. The large group of men - perhaps as many as eight - surrounded the woman outside a chicken restaurant above the 21st St.-Queensbridge station about 9 p.m., police and a witness said. The harassment, which may have included unwanted sexual advances toward the woman and grabbing, continued as she entered the subway station. The woman broke free from the men and frantically ran down to the platform and hopped on an F train, with the thugs right behind.
"They tried to physically drag her off the train, but she fights back," one cop said.
The struggle continued as the group pulled her off the train and dragged her up the stairs to the mezzanine level. At one point, the woman stabbed one of her attackers - identified by family as Thomas Winston, 29 - multiple times in the chest. The woman then sprinted back down to the platform - with the thugs in hot pursuit, said witness Ricardo Josephs, 41.
"Seven or eight of them were chasing the woman," said Josephs, an MTA employee. "They all jumped over the turnstiles after her. She got on the Queens [-bound F] train. They tried to grab her; they tried to hold the train - but she got away."
Winston, who lives in a nearby shelter and has a 10-month-old daughter, was pronounced dead at a Manhattan hospital.
The woman was still in the wind Thursday night, police said. One police source said investigators suspect the woman was acting in self-defense.
Winston has numerous prior arrests, including several raps for sale of narcotics, most recently in September.
Winston's aunt, Diane Greenspan, who has custody of his child, was stunned by his death.
"It's terrible, just terrible - on Christmas Eve!" she said, despairingly.
kburke@nydailynews.com
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Stabbing in Queens Leaves Man Dead, a Girl in Flight and Families in Grief
By A. G. SULZBERGER and KAREEM FAHIM
Published: December 25, 2009
NYTimes/POTH (Note reporter's anme-- this family used to own the NYTimes. Also note the efforts at moral equivalence)
Erika Brown was waiting for her 16-year-old daughter to return from the chicken and pizza restaurant down the street around 9 p.m. Thursday when a man banged loudly on her door, shouting. Ms. Brown could make out only a few words — her daughter’s name, something about a man, something about a knife. Out her window, she saw a crowd gathered outside the restaurant, the scene lit with the glow of police cars.
The painful flood of details followed as Ms. Brown ran to the restaurant. Her daughter Cyan, a high school sophomore, who everyone says looks just like her mother, had apparently been harassed while ordering food, by a group of neighborhood men who later chased her into the subway. One of the men, Thomas Winston, 29, now lay dead on the street, stabbed in the chest.
Hours later, a frightened, tearful Cyan called her older sister, Lynnea Adams, 21, and told her that a man had tried to push himself on her, and that she had pulled out a knife.
“She didn’t mean for that to happen, but at the same time she had to protect herself,” Ms. Adams said Friday.
Several blocks away, Diane Greenspan spent Christmas Eve waiting for her nephew, the father of the 10-month-old baby she was raising, to come by with presents. Instead, she, too, got a call from a distraught relative, who was crying so much it took her a while to understand what he was saying. The nephew, Mr. Winston, an aspiring rapper who has been arrested numerous times on weapons and drug charges, had bled to death outside Big New York Fried Chicken & Pizza, just above the 21st Street-Queensbridge stop on the F train in Queens.
“He said he was on his way, but he never made it,” Ms. Greenspan said Friday, her voice muted with a mix of disbelief and stoicism. “He was a person at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
And so two families who live in public housing projects in Long Island City spent Christmas sorting through tangled accounts of an ugly fight that left a young father dead and a teenage schoolgirl on the run.
A police spokesman said that the events began with a physical confrontation between a woman and a group of six to eight men, and that the group eventually chased the woman onto the subway platform and pulled her off of a Queens-bound F train.
On the platform, the police said, the woman stabbed Mr. Winston in the chest, then fled, possibly getting on a Manhattan-bound F train. As of Friday evening, there had been no arrests, and the weapon had not been recovered; Ms. Brown said the police had not spoken to her or Cyan.
Friends of Mr. Winston’s who said they witnessed the incident, however, said the stabbing took place above ground, and the girl fled into the subway station afterward, trailed by a group of men, who tried to catch her before she jumped on a train.
Lionell Cooper, 36, a rapper who said he had recorded and performed with Mr. Winston, said he watched as Mr. Winston stumbled backward out of the chicken place, tripped over a snowbank and fell, bleeding, into the street. He stood up, fell again to all fours and then crawled a short distance, Mr. Cooper added.
“He collapsed right here,” he said, pointing to blood stains on the street. “I got paper towels from the store and pressed them against his wound,” he added. “He just lost too much blood.”
On Friday morning, Mr. Winston’s friends placed two cardboard boxes marked “R.I.P.” at the spot just above the entrance to the subway station where Mr. Winston had collapsed. As the day progressed, people filled them with candles, most bearing Mr. Winston’s stage name, Black Box. In the morning cold, they talked to each other of sorrow, disbelief and anger.
“I’m not saying he was an angel,” said Waren Davis, 47. “But if he was your friend, he was your friend.”
One woman with swollen eyes placed a candle in the box, then cleaned the trash from the piles of snow on the sidewalk. She poured hot water from coffee cups to wash away some of the blood that still stained the street.
Back at Ms. Greenspan’s first-floor home, while Mr. Winston’s daughter giggled and played, relatives, including Mr. Winston’s grandmother, mourned a life they felt was on the mend after trouble with the law and homelessness. “He was trying to get his life together so he could get his child back,” Ms. Greenspan said.
Several blocks away at Ms. Brown’s fifth-floor apartment, the sorrow was for a young girl’s loss of innocence and the difficult, uncertain road that lay before her. Ms. Brown and Ms. Adams said that Cyan had not had previous problems with the law, and that they did not know why she would have had a knife. They said they knew she must turn herself in, but worried the family would suffer retaliation.
“She’s a young girl,” her sister said. “She’s a child.”
Alain Delaquérière and Sarah Maslin Nir contributed reporting.
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"Queensbridge station on the F line is also the bus transfer stop for the r110 bus to rikers island, a prison. There are a lot of halfway houses in that area too."
