NYC Homeless Man Arrested for Fatally Slashing Victim’s Neck on Subway

A homeless man was arrested Wednesday in New York City for fatally slashing a man in the neck while riding the subway.

Alvin Charles, 43, is accused of murdering Tommy Bailey, 43, on the southbound L train in Brooklyn at around 8:50 p.m. on September 30, according to the New York Police Department (NYPD).

The two men were engaged in a dispute before Charles allegedly pulled out a sharp object and stabbed Bailey in the neck. The victim reportedly stumbled onto the Atlantic Avenue subway station platform while the suspect took off.

Bailey was rushed by EMS to Brookdale Hospital but later died of his injuries, Breitbart News reported last week.

Bailey, a father of a son and a daughter, was known to be a hard worker as a union steamfitter and a star high school football and baseball player in the 1990s in the Canarsie neighborhood, the New York Post reported.

A longtime friend of Bailey also noted that he was a non-confrontational person.

“This is the last thing that would happen to him,” Omari Barnett told the New York Daily News. “He just goes to work. He’s not looking for trouble or getting into fights.”

Despite being known as non-confrontational, the GoFundMe page tells a story in which Bailey had once heroically “put himself in harm’s way” to save a young girl being viciously attacked by a gang of other young girls.

“Only time will tell if he was acting again as a hero last evening and it may have unfortunately cost him his life,” wrote Bill Abbate Jr., the page’s organizer.

Before being charged with murder, Charles had been previously arrested three times for menacing, assault as a hate crime, and assault, the Daily News reported. As the suspect was escorted from the police station on Wednesday, he reportedly pursed his lips and blew kisses to the media outside.

At the start of 2020, cash bail was eliminated in New York and has since contributed to a major crime wave in New York City.

While homicide is down overall, major crime has increased by 32.7 percent since last year, according to NYPD crime statistics. Transit crime in the Big Apple has also soared by 41.6 percent. Bailey’s death was the sixth homicide in the city’s transit system this year.

Breitbart News recently reported that rising violent crime has emerged as a deciding issue for most American voters with the 2022 midterm elections approaching. Recent polling shows that 77 percent of voters believe violent crime is a serious issue.

As violent crime soars in Democrat-run cities, Senate and House Republicans are highlighting the Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies in their campaign messaging.

You can follow Ethan Letkeman on Twitter at @EthanLetkeman.