Add one more subway homicide to the 28 others since COVID hit: Richard Washington passed away last week as a result of wounds suffered nearly 18 months before.
Back on Jan. 2, 2022, Washington was heading from the Far Rockaway homeless shelter where he lived to visit his parents when Brian Moolenaar, himself homeless as well as apparently mentally ill, lunged at him out of nowhere in the subway.
The stab in the neck left Washington paralyzed, in and out of hospitals until the end. He leaves behind a teenage son.
The case never got much publicity: It doesn’t push culture-war buttons as the death of Jordan Neely does.
But it’s every bit as much a tragedy, and an outrage.
More, it’s a reminder of all the other scary stuff that goes on, on the streets as well as the subways — never making the news but still feeding New Yorkers’ all-too-reasonable fears of crime and chaos.
The privileged crime-deniers want to treat the Neely case as a one-off and blame racism or somesuch.
In fact, all these horrors flow from the failure of our leaders to do something New York City had already done before the left took over: Make the subway safe.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
