A woman who was randomly shoved into the side of a moving subway car wondered if she was “going to die” after the terrifying attack — which put her in the hospital in desperate need of spinal surgery, police and a witness said Monday.
Nancy Marrero, 45, of Long Island City, said she spotted the victim fixing her hair while walking on the platform of the Lexington Avenue-63rd Street station around 6 a.m. Sunday when a man suddenly grabbed her head and ground it into the side of the departing train.
“She didn’t even see it coming,” Marrero told The Post. “With open palms he just mushed her head — not her body — into the train. She just tumbled, just kept spinning because the train kept hitting her.”
The victim’s face was left gashed to the bone, Marrero recalled.
“You could see the white inside, that’s how bad it was,” the postal worker said of the resulting gash that laced its way down the woman’s bloody face. “She said, ‘I don’t feel my arms. I feel like they’re broken.’
“She just kept asking me, ‘Am I going to die?’”
Authorities brought the victim, identified as Emine Ozsoy, 35, to Weill Cornell Medical Center, where doctors diagnosed her with a spinal fracture and said she would need surgery.
The NYPD is asking for the public’s help finding her attacker, whom police described as a man between the ages of 30 and 40 years old who stands about 5 feet 7 inches tall. He has a light complexion and ran off toward Second Avenue, cops said.
Marrero said Ozsoy told her immediately after the shoving that she didn’t know her attacker — or what had just transpired.
“I was like, ‘Do you know him?’ Marrero said. “She was like, ‘I don’t even know what happened.’ I said, ‘A gentleman just shoved your head into the train.’ She was like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t — I don’t even… I can’t even remember what happened.”
Ozsoy kept saying she wanted to go to sleep. But Marrero wouldn’t let her.
“I was like, ‘No, don’t go to sleep. Keep talking to me. You’re going to be fine,” Marrero said. “Every time she went to close her eyes, I would talk to her and she opened them back up. But she said she felt very weak, tired and sleepy.”
Surveillance photos released Monday showed the suspect loitering around the platform holding a cup of coffee.
The assailant didn’t look homeless or dirty, Marrero said. And the attack left her deeply shaken.
“When I got home that evening, I was in tears because I just kept seeing her face, seeing how he just mushed her into that train,” Marrero said.
“I am so frightened, and my son is frightened for me for when I have to leave in the morning to go to work,” Marrero said. “Now I keep my back against anything I can. I’m traumatized.”
Additional reporting by Amanda Woods