A retired postal worker recounted his 2006 commute from hell to a Manhattan jury today in emotional, dramatic testimony, complete with sound effects of the whirring saws a madman used to carve him to within inches of his life.
“He took two hacksaws and he plunged them into my chest,” Michael Steinberg, 71, said fighting back tears. “He started to saw me, it was electric, brrrrrrrr, he was sawing me up and I said, ‘Gee whiz mister, what do you want? You want my money? You want my credit cards? I will give you whatever you want but please stop sawing me!
“And he wouldn’t stop.”
Steinberg, who was headed to his graveyard shift, was entering the turnstile at the downtown 1 train on 110th Street and Broadway on July 6, 2006 when he made eye contact with ex-con Tareyton Williams.
“I kept going back and he kept hacksawing me he gave me no option but to go back. And I said, ‘Please don’t kill me. I got to take care of my wife, I got to take care of my mother,” he recounted.
The 4-foot-11 Morningside Heights man remembered the 6-foot-tall Williams towering over him. His voice heavy with emotion and his eyes brimming with tears, Steinberg continued his gory testimony.
“He never opened up his mouth, he never spoke, he never said a word and eventually I went back into the fetal position and I went back into the wall. And he continued to saw me.
“I could taste the blood in my mouth.”
Steinberg eventually forgave his attacker, who apologized to him before being sentenced to 18 years in prison, but he’s suing an MTA contractor for leaving the tools unattended on the subway platform.
Steinberg credits God for saving his life that day. The 8-pound saws cut within a millimeter of his vital organs, a surgeon told him.
The jury is expected to decide next week whether Five Star Electric Corp. was responsible for not locking down the tools as their staff worked on the subway tracks.
“What happened to me could have happened to anybody else just going to work,” Steinberg told The Post after the proceeding. “Because that’s what I was doing, just going to work.”
An attorney for the Queens-based contractor, Barbara Sheehan, argued that the case should be dismissed before its conclusion because the maniacal actions of Williams were “extraordinary” and couldn’t possibly have been foreseen by the workers.
Judge Michael Stallman ruled that the trial would continue and he’d let the jury decide.