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 a twist of transit justice, it’s the surviving goons who are now behind bars, prosecutors said.
“The victim was accosted, without provocation, and our investigation has shown that he defended himself while attempting to retrieve his property,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement Wednesday.
“As a result, my office will not be filing charges for the fatality.”
Gripping footage of the violent encounter on a 7 train on Dec. 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 goes back and grabs 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 try to get his things back, only to be attacked and pounded by several men in the group as they scattered and hid his bags.
The footage shows the victim then being shoved and slugged repeatedly by the group — until he has enough and pulled out a long knife and slashed his attackers, wounding at least two.
The cowardly thugs then scatter — one seen stumbling away, bleeding from his wounds — as the victim stands in the middle of the empty subway car, still clutching the knife.
Queens prosecutors said Moya was killed and defendant Phillipe Pena was wounded.
Pena, 26, and Walter, 29, and two others — Jose Valencia, 35, and Henry Toapanta, 32 — have now been indicted by a grand jury on robbery and assault charges in the incident.
The DA’s office said all of the suspects are also homeless.
“Our subways must be safe for the millions of people who depend on public transportation,” Katz said in her 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 comes amid a recent jump in subway violence and has similarities to earlier instances when straphangers fought back against transit thugs.
Most notable is the case of Daniel Penny, a Marine who was acquitted in the chokehold death of vagrant Jordan Neely on a Manhattan F train in 2023.
Another straphanger, Jordan Williams, fatally stabbed an aggressive homeless man who assaulted him and his companion on a Brooklyn J train later that year, but was cleared when a grand jury voted not to indict him on manslaughter and weapons charges.
