A subway rider was hit in the head with a hammer after he and another man bumped into one another on a Manhattan platform, police said.
The two men got into a verbal dispute after 9 p.m. at the 14th Street station on the 1/2/3 line after bumping into each other, according to police. After trading words, one of the men took out a hammer and struck the victim on the head.
The man with the hammer then took off, police said. The victim, an Asian man, was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where police described his condition as stable.
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Police are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime, according to a senior NYPD official.
An investigation into the attack is ongoing. No arrests have yet been made, and police are searching for a man who was wearing a red leather jacket, red shoes and blue jeans.
The incident comes almost two weeks after New York City started its new “Subway Safety Plan”, a 17-page program to fight the massive spike in transit crime in the still-recovering city.
But instead of going down, major transit crime have risen 30 percent, NYPD data from the last week of February showed, with felony assaults nearly doubling. According to the figures from the NYPD CompStat system, there were 55 major crimes in transit in the week of February 21, versus 42 the week prior and 18 in the same week a year earlier.
The NYPD also noted a sharp increase in enforcement, with arrests up 64% and criminal summons up nearly 10%.
The headlines regarding the violence have been unrelenting - a woman brutally beaten in the head with a hammer, another woman assaulted with a bag of feces to the face, plus stabbings, knife attacks and shootings and all other manners of violence.
