A mentally ill woman charged with shoving a pair of Mexican tourists onto the tracks at a Lower East Side subway station was ordered held without bail at her Thursday arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court, where prosecutors called the attack “every New Yorker’s nightmare.”
Ebony Butts, 42, was hit with assault charges for Monday’s frightening, unprovoked attack that endangered the pair, who are 27- and 28-years old.
Butts, wearing a hospital gown and appearing slightly disheveled in court, badgered photographers, telling them not to take her picture. She was otherwise passive as court officers led her through the Center Street courthouse.
Butts attacked the out-of-towners as they waited for an uptown F train at the Delancey St.-Essex St. station shortly after 2:15 a.m. Monday, hurling both women to the tracks, cops said.
The tourists escaped the assault with only minor injuries, but could have faced a grisly end if bystanders hadn’t rushed to their aid, prosecutors said at the court hearing.
“This case is every New Yorker’s nightmare and easily could have been a double homicide,” Assistant District Attorney Abel McDonnell said at Butts’ arraignment. “Had a train come into the station sooner or had the two women not received help from another rider, this would be an even graver case.”
The prosecutor’s argument echoed comments the suspect’s sister made in an interview with the Daily News on Wednesday, when she acknowledged the outcome of Butts unprovoked assault could have been far worse, describing her sister’s untreated mental illness as a disaster waiting to happen.
“My sister needs help,” Tueniesha Butts, 47, the suspect’s sister who lives in Maryland, told the Daily News. “It shouldn’t take for a time where she’s hurting somebody for them to see that she needs help. And they put her in jail, but jail is not where she belongs.”
“If somebody has mental health issues, the government and this country have enough money to help these people with mental disabilities before they go out and harm a citizen going to work, or going to school, especially when their family is speaking up trying to get them help,” she continued. “It’s falling on deaf ears and it’s not fair that you sit her in jail when that’s not the place she needs to be.”
Butts’ random attack preceded unprovoked stabbings in Queens and the Bronx that left one man dead and another man in critical condition.
Police arrested homeless man Feruz Radjabov on Wednesday for stabbing two men in minutes-apart random attacks in Queens the day before.
Radjabov, 40, allegedly stabbed a 25-year-old man at a Mobil gas station on North Conduit Ave. near Cohancy St. in Ozone Park about 5:15 p.m. Tuesday, cops said.
He then fled into the Aqueduct-North Conduit Ave. train station about a block away — and slashed a 69-year-old man in the neck on the Far Rockaway-bound platform, according to police.
The senseless attacks sent the older victim to Jamaica Hospital in critical condition. The younger man escaped Radjabov’s stabbing spree with non-life-threatening injuries and is recovering at the same hospital, cops said.
On Thursday, a man wielding a meat cleaver stabbed two men inside a Bronx laundromat, sending both victims to Lincoln Hospital, where one died, police said.