Police said Tuesday that an 18-year-old straphanger was stabbed to death on a Brooklyn subway train after his friend pulled the emergency brake as “a stupid kid prank,” which made the knife-wielding attacker angry.
Thursday night around 11:30 p.m., Isaiah Collazo of Staten Island was on a northbound D train near the Fourth Avenue and Pacific Street Station when his friend pulled the brake on the rail car as a joke.
That’s when Mark Smith, 25, who turned himself in to police on Tuesday, got into a fight with Collazo. He is then said to have pulled out a knife and stabbed the teen in the stomach.
So, Collazo and his friends are on the platform, said James Essig, Chief of Detectives for the NYPD. “They finally get on the train when it pulls in at 11:25.”
“The thing is pulled by his friend. This guy walks up to him and asks, “Why the hell did you do that?” Essig called the brake a “prank,” which usually makes riders wait longer. “Someone pulls out a knife, hits him, and stabs him.”
Police say that Smith then ran away from the station.
Collazo was taken to the New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.
Essig said that Smith from Brooklyn turned himself in and asked for a lawyer. He also said that even though the stabbing itself wasn’t caught on camera, “we have the video after the stabbing.”
The chief said that Smith has been arrested for robbery in 2020, assault in 2019 and another assault in 2016.
Essig said that witnesses, including some of Collazo’s friends, said that Smith was the one who hurt him.
Essig said that the reason was that it was a stupid kid’s joke.
He said that one of Collazzo’s friends was also stabbed but wasn’t hurt too badly.
According to NYPD data, there have been 578 criminal complaints in the city’s transit system so far this year, compared to 621 in the same time period last year. This is a drop of nearly 7% from last year.
Statistics show that complaints about six major crimes have gone up by more than 25% in the last month. This includes a nearly 60% rise in grand thefts, which went up from 57 in the same month in 2022 to 91 so far this year.
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