An elderly Manhattan man broke into loud sobs as his attorney recounted to a jury the harrowing tale of his near fatal encounter with a power-saw wielding madman on an uptown subway platform.
“I almost died,” Michael Steinberg, 70, told The Post outside Manhattan Supreme Court on the first day of his trial against the MTA contractor he blames for the bloodbath.
“I don’t want to live through this again,” the retired postal worker added. “It’s just because they don’t want to reach a settlement of any kind.”
Steinberg is still haunted by the face of madman Tareyton Williams and said he has to pop two Valiums before going underground.
On July 6, 2006, the lunatic Williams grabbed two, 8-pound, battery-operated hacksaws and sliced up Steinberg on the downtown 1 train platform at 110th Street and Broadway.
The Morningside Heights resident has called his attacker, who apologized to him before he was sentenced to 18 years in prison, “a sick man.”
He holds the contractor, Five Star Electric Corp., responsible for their negligence in not locking down the tools and for not coming to his aid during the butchery.
In opening statements today, Steinberg’s attorney, Ronald Landau, said Williams was pacing the platform, yelling and, oddly, clutching a teddy bear.
“There was nobody and nothing to prevent anybody — crazy person, sane person, thief, non-thief — from walking over to those power tools and just lifting them off,” Landau told the five-man, five-woman jury.
He added that Five Star broke its own policy by failing to cordon off the work area with yellow caution tape and cones.
But the contractor’s attorney, Barbara Sheehan, said that one of the workers was within two to three feet of the tool cart when Williams swiped the saws.
“What we have is an unexpected, unforeseeable action by somebody who did something that really none of us could really conceive of,” Sheehan insisted.
Steinberg is expected to testify on Wednesday about the horrific, 3:30 a.m. encounter, where the blade wounds, that sliced through three ribs and punctured a lung, were within a millimeter of taking his life.
During a break in the proceedings, he pulled his collared shirt to the side to reveal a half-inch scar from where one of the blades went into his left shoulder.
“If it wasn’t for the contractor the assailant couldn’t have gotten the hacksaws to attack me,” Steinberg said. “I don’t hold him responsible because he was mentally deranged.”
The Five Star workers were repairing a sound system when Williams grabbed their equipment and wildly lunged at another straphanger before targeting Steinberg.
Five Star, based in Queens, has said it did safeguard its equipment and blames Williams, an ex-con from the Bronx, for the incident.
Steinberg originally sued both the contractor and the Transit Authority in 2007 for unspecified damages, but the authority was let off the hook because of government immunity.