Man pushed onto NYC subway tracks recovering while suspect is charged with attempted murder

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Man pushed onto NYC subway tracks recovering while suspect is charged with attempted murder

2025-01-03 06:18 Last Updated At：06:22

A man survived being shoved onto subway tracks ahead of an incoming train in New York City on New Year's Eve and is expected to fully recover, relatives said, while the person accused of pushing him was being held without bail Thursday on attempted murder and assault charges.

Joseph Lynskey, 45, was standing on the platform in the West 18th Street station in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood on Tuesday afternoon when another man pushed him onto the tracks as a 1 train approached. Police called it a random attack.

Lynskey's condition has been upgraded from critical to stable, police said. His injuries include a fractured skull, broken ribs and a ruptured spleen, authorities said.

“Miraculously, he survived the horrific attack, but he suffered many injuries and remains hospitalized in NY,” his sister, Jennifer Lynskey, wrote in a Facebook post. “Anyone who's ever met Joe knows he's one of the kindest, most thoughtful, and caring humans out there."

“Joe has a long road ahead of him, both physically and emotionally/mentally,” she continued.

She urged people to donate to a GoFundMe page to help pay for his medical expenses and other bills. The page had raised over $70,000 by Thursday afternoon.

Joseph Lynskey did not return phone and email messages Thursday.

He is head of content and music programming for Gray V, a New York City-based company that creates soundtracks and music playlists for customers, according to his LinkedIn page. He was born and raised in Miami and performs as a DJ known as Joe Usher, his website says.

A police report said surveillance video showed the suspect push Joseph Lynskey onto the tracks as a train approached, and he was hit by the train.

The recording, published by news outlets, shows a man standing on the platform, appearing to be looking at his phone, when another man in a black jacket with his hood up passes behind him, stops, then charges back and pushes him. The victim falls onto the tracks in front of the train as it arrives at the station.

Other videos posted on social media show firefighters going down to the tracks through a gap in between subway cars and pulling a person back up onto the platform.

Authorities did not say how Lynskey escaped with just broken bones. While a direct hit with a train is often fatal, some who fall from New York City’s platforms do manage to survive. Safety experts say if it’s not possible to get back on a platform or outrun a slowing train, lying down in the trough between the tracks may work in some stations, and there might be a space between the train and the platform at some stops.

Kamel Hawkins, 23, was taken into custody later that day. A judge in Manhattan approved a request by prosecutors on Wednesday to detain the Brooklyn resident without bail pending his next court appearance on Monday.

Hawkins already had pending assault and harassment charges in Brooklyn, where he is accused of throwing bleach on a woman and trying to break into her home after threatening her, according to prosecutors.

Hawkins' lawyer in the subway case, Darryl Hairston, did not immediately return a phone message Thursday. His lawyer in the Brooklyn case, Jeremy Gross, said he had no immediate comment.

Hawkins' father, Shamel Spencer, told The New York Times that he's stunned by the allegations. He said Hawkins had some troubles with the law, but he never thought his son would be charged with anything so violent. He also said he had been seeking help for his son because of concerns about his mental health and that he didn't seem like himself in recent weeks.

“He’s not a bad kid at all,” Spencer said.

The possibility of being pushed onto the tracks is a long-running nightmare for many New Yorkers. While it occurs rarely compared to the millions of rides each day, a push just this past March killed a person in East Harlem.

In New York, personal safety in the subway is generally comparable to safety in the city as a whole. But life-threatening crimes such as stabbings and shoves spread alarm about the trains, which carried more than 1 billion riders in 2024.

Police figures show major crimes on subways were down through November compared with the same period last year, but killings rose from five to nine.

Jimmy Carter's funeral begins by tracing 100 years from rural Georgia to the world stage

2025-01-05 09:39 Last Updated At：09:50

ATLANTA, Ga. (AP) — Jimmy Carter 's extended public farewell began Saturday in Georgia, with the 39th U.S. president’s flag-draped casket tracing his long arc from the Depression-era South and family farming business to the pinnacle of American political power and decades as a global humanitarian.

Those chapters shone throughout the opening stanza of a six-day state funeral intended to blend personalized memorials with the ceremonial pomp afforded to former presidents. The longest-lived U.S. executive, Carter died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100.

“He was an amazing man. He was held up and propped up and soothed by an amazing woman,” son James Earl “Chip” Carter III, told mourners at The Carter Center late Saturday afternoon, referring also to his mother, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023. “The two of them together changed the world. And it was an amazing thing to watch so close.”

Grandson Jason Carter, who now chairs the center's governing board, said, “It's amazing what you can cram into a hundred years.”

Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch as his hearse rode first Saturday through his hometown of Plains, which at about 700 residents is not much bigger than when Carter was born there Oct. 1, 1924. The procession stopped at the farm where the future president toiled alongside the Black sharecroppers who worked for his father. The motorcade continued to Atlanta, stopping in front of the Georgia Capitol where Carter served as a state senator and reformist governor.

Finally, he arrived for his last visit to the Carter Presidential Center, which houses his presidential library and The Carter Center where he based his post-White House advocacy for public health, democracy and human rights, setting a new standard for what former presidents can accomplish after they yield power.

“His spirit fills this place,” Jason Carter told the assembly that included some of the center's 3,000 employees worldwide. “You continue the vibrant living legacy of what is my grandfather’s life work,” he added.

Pallbearers on Saturday came from the Secret Service that protected the Carters for almost a half-century and a military honor guard that included Navy servicemembers for the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to reach the Oval Office. A military band played “Hail to the Chief” and the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” for the commander in chief who also was a devout Baptist.

His longtime personal pastor, the Rev. Tony Lowden, remembered not a president but the frail man who spent the last 22 months in hospice care, “wrapped in a blanket” that included the words of Psalm 23.

Chip Carter recalled “the boss” he had to make an appointment to see in the Oval Office, but also the father who spent an entire Christmas break learning Latin and teaching his 8th-grade son who had failed a test. When he took that test again, the younger Carter said, he aced it: “I owed it to my father, who spent that kind of time with me.”

Jimmy Carter will lie in repose at the Carter Presidential Center from 7 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Tuesday, with the public able to pay respects around the clock.

Scott Lyle, an engineer who grew up in Georgia but now lives in New York, was among the first mourners to pay his respects. Lyle said he joined Carter to build homes with Habitat for Humanity for the first time in LaGrange, Georgia, in 2003. Since then, he has traveled around the world to build houses with the group.

“I got to see, what some people don’t get to see, close. He was an amazing man, and he cared about others. He walked the walk,” said Lyle, who was wearing Carter-themed Habitat gear. “And I can’t think of anyone else that I would want to stand in line to pay my respects for.”

National rites will continue in Washington and conclude Thursday with a funeral at Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains. There, the former president will be buried next to his wife of 77 years near the home they built before his first state Senate campaign in 1962.

The Carters lived nearly all their lives in Plains, with the exception of his Naval service, four years in the Governor's Mansion and four years in the White House. As his hearse rolled through the town, mourners lined the main street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins bearing images of the former president and his signature smile.

Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as hailing from a bygone era of American politics.

“This man, he thought of more than just himself,” said Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Plains. Browner said it meant “a great deal” to have a president come from a small Southern town like his — something he worries isn’t likely to happen again.

Indeed, Carter helped plan his own funeral to emphasize that his remarkable rise to the world stage was because of — not despite — his deep rural roots.

Over the course of a few blocks in Plains, the motorcade passed near where the Carters ran the family peanut warehouse, and the small home where his mother, a nurse, had delivered the future first lady in 1927. The hearse passed the old train depot that served as Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign headquarters — a barebones effort that depended on public financing, dwarfed by the billion-dollar U.S. presidential campaigns of the 21st century.

At the Carter farm, a few dozen National Park Service rangers stood in formation in front of the home, which did not have running water or electricity when Carter was a boy. The old farm bell rang 39 times to honor Carter's place as the 39th president.

Beside the house, there remains the tennis court that Carter's father, James Earl Carter Sr., built for the family — a nod to the blend of privilege and hard rural life that defined the future president's upbringing. Carter worked the land throughout the Great Depression, but it was owned by the elder Carter, who employed the surrounding Black tenant farmers during the era of Jim Crow segregation.

Carter wrote and spoke extensively on those formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw influenced his policies in government and human rights work.

Calvin Smyre, a former Georgia legislator, remembered that legacy Saturday at the state Capitol. Smyre, who is Black, said Carter’s repudiation of racial segregation allowed Black people to wield power in Georgia.

“We stand on the shoulder of courageous people like Jimmy Carter,” Smyre said. “What he did shocked and shook the political ground here in the state of Georgia. And we live better because of that.”

Payne reported from Plains, Georgia.

Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.

Man pushed onto NYC subway tracks recovering while suspect is charged with attempted murder

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Man pushed onto NYC subway tracks recovering while suspect is charged with attempted murder

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