An ice pick-wielding homeless “lunatic” with a legal historical past shoved an aged man to the bottom in Midtown Tuesday morning after threatening different folks, police and the sufferer mentioned.
Sufferer Robert Gula, 76, mentioned he was attacked close to his workplace round 10:20 a.m. whilst he tried to keep away from the unhinged brute, recognized by police as Brian Wilbur, who had simply pushed one other girl moments earlier.
“So there’s this lunatic screaming on the nook of Sixth Avenue and thirty eighth Avenue,” Gula advised The Submit.
“And I mentioned, ‘Oh yeah, I higher avoid him,’ and everyone’s him. And he goes as much as a lady and he says, ‘F–king b–h. He pushes her. I mentioned, ‘Oh my God.’”
Gula walked over to Broadway to mail some letters and thought he was within the clear when the suspect launched at him.
“Rapidly I hear this screaming, and he pushes me, and I fell proper down on the street,” he recalled. “I’ve obtained bruises on my knees and my elbows.”
Wilbur, 36, was arrested close to the scene and charged with second-degree assault, authorities mentioned.
He’s beforehand been arrested 4 occasions, together with for second-degree assault in October 2021, cops mentioned. Different previous costs embody legal mischief, hate crime menacing with a weapon and leaping a turnstile, in response to police.
Although Gula was thankfully not stabbed, he considered the knife-wielding homeless man who fatally stabbed three harmless victims in Manhattan on Monday after he was pushed.
“However I used to be pondering of the knife factor the day earlier than,” he mentioned. “And, oh, it was horrible.”
“[I’m] the final particular person on this planet that I believed it might occur to. And proper on Broadway and thirty eighth,” he mentioned, which he used to assume was a secure space.
“However what’s secure anymore? I don’t know,” Gula mentioned. “Look the place the stabbings happened. Is something a secure space? What’s being carried out? It’s scary.”
“I stroll within the daylight. And I believed I used to be very secure,” he added. “Apparently, that’s not true.”
Gula, who has lived within the Large Apple since 1986 and works for a enterprise that makes for props for TV shoots, mentioned he desires metropolis officers, together with Mayor Eric Adams, to do extra to fight crime within the metropolis, together with deploying extra cops.
Adams on Tuesday referred to as on Albany pols to work to get mentally sick homeless folks off the streets involuntarily in mild of the deadly triple stabbing.
“Nicely, I stay on East fortieth Avenue. I feel it’s a reasonably secure space,” Gula mentioned.
“I run into homeless all over the place … I don’t know who’s mentally sick and what whatnot … So there’s, there’s an abundance of them round, like, and I stroll by, and I’m like, ‘What are these folks gonna do to me subsequent?’’
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