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A heroic straphanger knifed by alleged Brooklyn madman Maksim Gelman defiantly stood up to his attacker before helping cops take him down.
“You better hope I f- -king die, because I’m going to kill you if I don’t!” rider Joseph Lozito screamed as he and two heroic cops subdued the 23-year-old accused killer aboard a packed No. 3 train Saturday.
Lozito, speaking yesterday from his bed at Bellevue Hospital, gave The Post a harrowing blow-by-blow of his underground brush with death as he came face to face with the drug-addled psycho.
Lozito, a mixed martial arts buff and married father of two boys ages 7 and 10, said he was sitting on the train on his regular commute from suburban Philadelphia to his box-office job at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center when Gelman caught his eye at around 9:15 a.m.
“I was on the seat right near the door [to the motorman’s compartment]. This guy walked by, and he looked creepy,” said the burly Lozito, 40, who stands 6-feet-2 and weighs 265.
Gelman tapped on the motorman’s door, Lozito said. Two transit cops were inside.
One of the cops, Officer Terrence Howell, asked, “Who are you?” recalled Lozito.
“[Gelman] said ‘Police! Police!’ and the cop said, ‘No, you’re not,’ ” Lozito said.
“[Gelman was] two or three feet away from me, and he pulls this knife out, looks me in the eye and says, ‘You’re gonna die!’ And he lunged at me with the knife.”
Gelman stabbed Lozito on the head.
As the psycho drew his arm back for what might have been a fatal cut, Lozito said, he saw an opening.
“There was a split second as soon as I saw his arm go back, I knew it was my chance to move,” Lozito said. “I tried to take him down with a wrestling move called a single-leg takedown, but it ended up more like a football tackle.”
As blood poured from his wounds and the pair scuffled, the cops brought Gelman down.
One passenger applied pressure to Lozito’s head wound to stanch the flow of blood.
“I owe him a debt of gratitude. To me, he’s the reason I’m alive,” he said.
Lozito was taken to Bellevue, where doctors stitched a 4-inch gash on the back of his head, an 8-inch cut behind his right ear, two 3-inch wounds on his left arm and cuts under his eye and on his thumb.