MTA workers on edge after string of assaults, stabbing of bus driver in New York

NEW YORK — A Brooklyn bus driver says she was punched in the face in East New York after a passenger missed his stop on Friday, one of at least three assaults on transit workers in four days including a brutal stabbing.

The driver of a B6 bus, who spoke on the condition that her name be withheld because she feared for her safety with her assailant on the loose, wore a patch over her right eye Tuesday while speaking to reporters at the Transport Workers Union Local 100 hall in Brooklyn.

“A guy gets up and he says, ‘you passed my stop, can you let me off?'” she said. “I said, ‘I cannot let you off,'”

The driver said he asked again, and she gave the same answer.

“Before I finished it, I was getting punched in my face — driving, and I still had to make sure that I don’t crash,” she continued.

“Then he said to me, ‘B—h, open the door or I’m going to kill you,'” she said. “So I stopped and I opened the door, because I thought about my precious kids that I wanted to get home to.”

The driver was hit in both of her eyes, according to an MTA incident report reviewed by the Daily News.

“Sometimes people come and they just take their anger out on us,” she said.

Police sources confirmed the details of the assault Tuesday.

As previously reported by The News, another bus driver was attacked in East New York on Saturday. An angry passenger stabbed 60-year-old MTA driver Isaac Egharevba in the neck after striking him with a bottle, cops said. Egharevba has since been released from Kings County Hospital.

NYC Transit president Rich Davey denounced the attacks on his bus drivers Tuesday.

“The senseless attacks of the last few days on bus operators who were doing their job of moving New York City simply cannot continue, period,” he told The News in a statement.

“Thankfully, our high-quality network of bus cameras have produced clear images and we are confident as ever that the NYPD will find the individuals responsible and deliver maximum justice for our colleagues.”

Union officials said a third transit worker — a conductor working on the D train — was punched while working at 145th St. Monday night.

“We are not the public’s punching bag,” J.P. Patafio, TWU’s vice president for buses, said Tuesday.

“Eventually, something’s going to happen,” Patafio said, “and transit workers are going to march with their feet.”

New York state prohibits work stoppages and other actions by public sector workers under the Taylor Law.

MTA leadership accused TWU of violating that prohibition in February, when crews slowed down A train service after conductor Alton Scott was violently slashed in an overnight attack.

Asked if he was threatening a strike, Patafio demurred.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “If there’s a house that’s burning, people are going to leave the house.”