Daniel Conlisk
Sunando Sen
CHILLING ECHO: Erika Menendez, accused of pushing Sunando Sen (inset) to his death under a 7 train, punched ex-firefighter Daniel Conlisk (above right) in an unprovoked attack in 2003. (
)
He’s just glad he didn’t run into her on a subway platform.
A retired FDNY battalion chief yesterday recalled a violent 2003 encounter with accused subway pusher Erika Menendez — in which she showed what a menace to society she was by ranting like a madwoman and randomly attacking him outside his Queens home.
“She said, ‘You f–ked my mother!’ ” Daniel Conlisk told The Post yesterday. “She just punched me in the face.”
Conlisk, 65, said his heart skipped a beat when he heard news this week that Menendez had struck again — allegedly pushing helpless commuter Sunando Sen to his death Thursday in front of a Queens 7 train because she thought he was Muslim.
“It gives me chills that she did this to the other guy,” Conlisk said. “I guess I was lucky.”
The former firefighter said he was disposing of trash at about 10 p.m. on June 20, 2003, near his Ridgewood, Queens, home, when Menendez, whose boyfriend lived up the block, inexplicably confronted him.
He had no idea who she was, but she seemed to be out of her mind and ranting manically about him sleeping with her mom.
The then-21-year-old suddenly slugged Conlisk.
“It stunned me. It knocked me back,” he recalled. “She was quick. It was no little-girl hit. It was a punch, like a guy punch. It was tough.”
Menendez continued to scratch at Conlisk’s face before he managed to return some blows and escape the unprovoked assault.
“Eventually, I had to punch her just to get her off me, to knock her back so I could get back in the door,” he said.
When cops arrived, Menendez continued to scream at Conlisk and accused him of stealing her jewelry while they were in high school — despite the obvious age difference.
“That’s when they realized she was whacked out,” he recalled. “When she said that, I guess everyone realized it was bull crap.”
Conlisk said that Menendez was given six months’ probation for the attack and that he took out an order of protection against her.
“She’s a lot bigger now,” he said after seeing his attacker on television.
Conlisk was unaware that just two months prior to his beating, Menendez had been arrested for assaulting an ex-boyfriend in their shared apartment just up the street.
According to sources, Menendez knocked then-boyfriend John Goelz, now 36, in the face during an argument in April of that year.
In addition to those busts, Menendez was picked up for cocaine possession in Manhattan in 2008 and had three additional sealed arrests since then, law-enforcement sources said.
Menendez was arrested Saturday morning and charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime in the attack on Sen, a Hindu immigrant.
Officials said Menendez believed Sen was a Muslim and attacked as “revenge” for 9/11.
Meanwhile, a source told The Post that Menendez had been treated as recently as two months ago at Bellevue Hospital and had been discharged.
“There are going to be questions about that — what the circumstances were and what her condition was when they let her go,” the source said.
The attack was the second deadly shoving assault in the subway in just the past month.
Police say a homeless man, Naeem Davis, has confessed to shoving a Queens man, Ki Suk Han, to his death in front a Q train in Midtown’s 49th Street station earlier this month.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona