Jose Rojas
BRAVE GAL:Ute Linhart with friends yesterday after testifying against the man accused of shoving her into an oncoming subway train. Inset: Jose Rojas (Steven Hirsch)
First, the stranger on the platform met her eyes with “a crazy stare.”
Then, as the uptown train barreled into the Broadway and 28th Street station, fashion exec Ute Linhart felt two hands push her hard from behind — a New York City nightmare come to life — so forcefully, she flew off her feet.
“I felt the hard push from behind,” Linhart told a Manhattan Supreme Court jury yesterday, testifying against José Rojas, 26, who is fighting attempted-murder charges by insisting he’d merely had too much to drink that day and bumped the woman by accident.
“Definitely, nothing seemed accidental,” Linhart told jurors.
Her impact with a subway car’s front right edge was so hard it broke her shoulder, jaw, cheekbone, forearm, several teeth, and eight ribs.
The impact left her with a puncture that filled her lungs with blood.
“I had no chance to avoid hitting the oncoming train,” Linhart testified.
“I was basically in the air for lack of a better word. Flying into the oncoming train.”
A statuesque German native in her early 40s, with a blond braid that reached the small of her back, Linhart left the courtroom and smilingly embraced a group of relatives and friends.
But on the stand, she spoke crisply and tensely as she described her ordeal, occasionally flicking her eyes toward Rojas, who sat watching her from the defense table.
On that August 2010 Wednesday night, Linhart had been heading uptown and home from her job as creative director for a company that makes T-shirts and other music-related merchandising.
Rojas was a cook at Cipriani’s on West Broadway at the time and had spent the afternoon watching a soccer game at a deli, where cameras recorded him downing four 22-ounce cans of beer.
“How forceful was the shove?” Assistant District Attorney David Drucker asked the woman.
In opening statements, he’d told jurors that had Rojas struck one second earlier, this would likely have been a murder trial.
“It was very forceful,” she answered.
After eight days in the hospital and six months unable to work, she still suffers the pain and tingling from spinal damage, she told jurors.
Linhart stuck to her account when cross-examined by defense lawyer Roger Asmar, who repeatedly asked her whether it was possible that she’d just been accidentally bumped or jostled.
“There was way too much force behind it,” she insisted at one point.