Times Square subway shover gets 12 years in jail as victim describes ‘nightmare’ incident, her lingering anxiety
A mentally ill woman who pushed a passenger into a moving subway in Times Square was sentenced to 12 years in jail on Thursday for an attack the victim described as "a nightmare, like a scene from a horror movie."
Anthonia Egegbara, 32, was hit with the jail time for a 2021 attack that left a 42-year-old New Jersey woman, Lenny Javier, with a broken arm, a broken nose, a fractured chin and ongoing emotional trauma.
The painful memories were enough to keep Javier out of Manhattan Criminal Court, where Egegbara was sentenced. But she provided a powerful victim's impact statement that explained the agony of her frightening ordeal.
"I found myself in some part of a nightmare, like a scene from a horror movie that I'd watched before," Javier wrote in a letter read aloud by Andrea Kimmel, an assistant Manhattan district attorney.
"The fear crawled into my life like an insect. I look at my face in the mirror and still see physical marks that have changed my features, and will be there forever; being the victim of a violent, cruel crime has forced me to live with anxiety."
Prosecutors said Egegbara was sitting on a bench inside the 42nd St. subway station on Oct. 4, 2021, when she got up, rushed over to Javier and without any warning pushed her into an oncoming, northbound No. 3 train.
The caught-on-camera attack shows Javier getting shoved so hard into the side of the moving subway that she lost a shoe as she fell onto the platform. Had the push happened a fraction of a second earlier, the victim would have been thrown right in front of the hurtling train.
Egegbara fled the station, but she was arrested the next day.
"The question 'Why me?' stayed in my mind," Javier wrote. "My life was shattered. The nightmare stayed and persisted ever since."
Egegbara, who suffers from schizophrenia, had been arrested at least seven times before, according to NYPD records; the three most recent incidents involved her allegedly kicking or biting other women on the train.
Egegbara, who was charged with assault, pleaded guilty last month to the attack on Javier.
Javier filed a lawsuit last year against the MTA for not doing enough to protect passengers from the "known problem of violent mentally ill people."
