The precarious, terrifying hours after a woman was shoved into a train

Emine Yilmaz Ozsoy was partially paralyzed and in critical condition, surrounded by a makeshift support net. Her story embodies the fears and challenges of post-pandemic New York.

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On her way to work, she was pushed by a speeding subway and lay in the intensive care unit at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. She underwent two surgeries and her body was so devastated that she was kept under surveillance for fear her damaged artery would fail.

On Thursday, Ozsoy was still partially paralyzed but was gathering strength, testing her remaining mobility and realizing what had happened to her since early Sunday morning, when a man was on a train pulling off Lexington Avenue/63rd stuck her head in the train at the street station.

“At the moment, her journey has been a very scary one,” her husband, Ferdi Ozsoy, said in an interview.

Emine Yilmaz Ozsoy, 35, has embodied the spirit of New York’s “hustlers” since moving from Istanbul in 2017, while cousin Deniz Gunduz ) explain. She gave up her career as a page designer at one of Turkey’s most influential newspapers to pursue a more creative path. In New York, she started a career as an artist and illustrator while learning English and finding a job as a barista. Relatives said she was focused, positive, relentlessly independent.

Now, Ozsoy, suddenly vulnerable, is at the center of concentric circles of care: nurses and doctors monitoring her in the intensive care unit; come friends. Outside those inner circles is a New York City resident who embodies the ongoing fear of such violence, and whose story crystallizes the endemic problem of underground safety.

Authorities said the attack on Ozsoy was carried out by Kamal Semrade, 39, who was arrested late Monday at a homeless shelter near LaGuardia Airport in Queens and charged with attempted murder and not allowed bail. His attorney, Rebecca Heinsen, said in a statement her client should be presumed innocent and cautioned against drawing conclusions about him.

The odds of being a victim of violent crime on the subway are statistically low, but with no apparent motive, the apparently random attack reignited fears of unsafe underground cities.

Inside the hospital, however, there is only one focal point: Ozsoy.

On Sunday, she underwent a marathon therapy session that lasted more than 12 hours. Gunduz said she underwent an MRI and CT scan before being rushed to an operating room after her neck was found to be broken.

During her arraignment, prosecutor Carolyn McGuigan said Semrad had “broken cervical spine, broken fingers, lacerated scalp and damage to four major blood vessels”.

By Monday morning, Ozsoy was able to fully lift one arm, faster than doctors expected. By Thursday, she could raise her arms, but she couldn’t move her hands, and her legs remained paralyzed, her husband said. The battery of the machine supporting her has been reduced to an intravenous drip.

Family and friends stayed by Ozsoy’s bedside day and night. Only two people are allowed to sit with her in the ward at a time, so the others wait in a family room full of food left by visitors. Her husband or Gunduz had to meet well-wishers outside the hospital to update them on Ozsoy’s condition. Her colleagues also launched an online fundraiser to help with family expenses.

Sitting Wednesday behind Matto Espresso on Second Avenue in Manhattan, Ozzoy was placed where she worked the day she was attacked, as her husband and her cousin grapple with the serendipity of the attack and fear for their loved ones. The future of people. “What is Emien going to do now?” Gunduz asked.

Ozzoy has been building her community and life in New York, relatives and friends said. An avid artist, she would take her iPad to the park and draw for hours. Ferdi Ozsoy wrote in a statement that her work has appeared in numerous magazines and she has worked with clients such as Airbnb, Puma, Chicago Magazine and the band Maroon 5.

Emine Yilmaz Ozsoy is “the sweetest person you’ll ever meet,” according to her husband, who is quiet and observant. Art is how she expresses herself. Her vibrant illustrations invite people to read in the park and walk in the city. She is also promoted at the cafe and has just been told she will be promoted to supervisor.

The Ozsoys met in Turkey in 2011 and married in 2014, Ferdi Ozsoy said. A native New Yorker, he said he told her before they moved to the US that New York would be where her dreams would come true. He said that while they decided to separate, they remained “partners for life”.

He lived near Tampa, Florida, but they talked a lot, and they had dinner in New York the week before her episode. He said he could see her thriving in the new life she was building.

“She felt it, and she was able to do it,” he said. “Until Sunday.”

That day, Emine Yilmaz Ozsoy walked into a transit system that has been struggling since the pandemic left passengers empty. The subway is the city’s economic lifeblood, and its condition determines New York’s broader well-being.

Ridership has fallen during the prolonged lockdown and there have been concerns about crime in a system with a dwindling population. Mayor Eric Adams unveiled what he said is a plan to help make subways safer by flooding them with police and mental health workers and evacuating more than 1,000 homeless people.

But while the system’s overall crime rate has declined in recent months, violence persists: a senseless murder on the Q train, a mass shooting on the R train in Brooklyn, a mass shooting on the F train this month. A homeless person was suffocated to death.

The attack on Ozzoy took hold among New Yorkers’ fears: an unstoppable train ramming suddenly and violently.

In a case that rocked the city in 2022, Michelle Alyssa Go, who works in mergers and acquisitions, left her apartment on the Upper West Side and was pushed from behind by a 61-year-old man on a subway platform in Times Square, pushing her on the South Dead before the line of the train. Police said the man who pushed her, Martial Simon, was found unfit to stand trial and was being held indefinitely in a locked mental institution.

On Sunday, Ozzoy was on his way to work when he was on the train to his home in Jackson Heights, Queens. Semrade boarded the same train at the station, police said. Both got off the bus at Lexington Avenue/63rd Street around 6 a.m., officials said.

As the train pulled away, Semrade approached Ozsoy from behind, grabbed her head with both hands and “pushed her with all his might into the moving subway car,” prosecutor McGuigan said in Semrade’s arraignment. “She hit the train with her face and her head, rolled along the train and then crashed back onto the platform and she was immediately paralyzed,” she said.

At 6:04 a.m., Ozsoy owner Eli Naim, who runs the Matto Espresso coffee chain, got a call. But when he answered the phone, Ozsoy wasn’t the one who answered it.

He said a woman he didn’t know told him there had been an accident on the subway and Ozzoy had been injured. He could hear Ozsoy telling someone in the background to “call Eli”.

In Florida, Ferdi Ozsoy received a call from a police officer after the attack informing him that his wife was in the hospital, but he was not told the extent of her injuries. Not long after, he got another call, this time from a doctor, he said, telling him that Emine Yilmaz Ozsoy had asked him to be her before the operation. medical agent.

“That’s when I called Deniz,” Fediozsoy said. “I said, ‘Deniz, I’m not in New York. Please walk over to her.'”

Gunduz has been updating Emine Yilmaz Ozsoy’s parents and four siblings in Turkey about her situation as they seek urgent passports and visas to come to New York.

For the family, the attack was a personal and intimate blow.

“We never thought this was going to happen to us,” Ferdi Ozsoy said, adding that all New Yorkers should consider the violence that has taken place and what it means for the city.

“Those subway stations aren’t just for taking a person from one place to another; they’re the arteries of the city,” he said, adding, “If we’re not safe in those arteries, where are we safe going?”

This article originally appeared on New York Times.

By Hurubie Meko

Photography: Jeenah Moon

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