Late Friday night, a 20-year-old Queens college student was fatally hit by an L Train after a verbal and physical altercation with a fellow straphanger spilled onto the subway tracks. Police have released a sketch of the man suspected of starting the fight around 10 p.m. at the Bedford Avenue L train station which led to the death of Howard Beach resident Joshua Basin. A week earlier, Basin had posted a picture on Facebook of himself and friends posing next to a moving subway car: “It looks like I almost got hit by the train,” he joked on his Facebook wall.
Joshua Basin
witnesses the suspect was drunk and "looking for a fight." Police say he eventually singled out Basin for no apparent reason, then said, "It's showtime" before starting to punch him.
While the alleged assailant, believed to be in his 30s, was able to climb back up and flee the scene, Basin couldn't get out of the tracks in time. He was struck by another Manhattan-bound L train and pinned against the platform; he was later pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital. Brooklyn resident Sean R. Nyffeler, who was on the train at the time, described the horrific scene:
I was on this train. Sitting in the frontmost car, actually—the one that hit him and pinned him against the platform—and I felt the two or three dull thuds that jostled the entire car when it ran him over. The conductor was clearly trying her best to stop in time, but I don’t think people realize just how fast these trains go. The statistic you always hear is that 50% off all people who go down onto the tracks die, regardless of when or why or how inebriated.
The conductor rushed back into the car and told us all to back up away from the windows. She kept shouting, “Get back! You don’t want to see this!” She had to stand up on the seats and yell through the sliver of opened window, instructing people on the platform to take his pulse. She told all of us to go into the next car, but as we shuffled through the emergency doors another MTA worker came in from the second car and opened half of one of the doors in our car, ushering us out through there.
They told us not to crowd around and, yeah, I believed the conductor when she said I didn’t want to see this, but in my daze I caught a glimpse of him before I turned and left the station. He was stuck, like all the articles say, between the car and the platform from his waist down, facing the train. He was moving his arms so I knew he wasn’t dead yet, but as I stumbled up the stairs and onto Bedford Ave. I also knew there was no coming back from that. I spent the rest of the night in a state of shock and horror.
Basin's devastated mother told reporters he was a student at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City studying psychology: "Whoever did this is a coward," Zena Basin told NBC. "My son was very friendly. He would never hurt anybody, if you ask any of his friends, they knew that he would go out of his way to help them."
