A Brooklyn music programmer who miraculously survived a New Year’s Eve subway shove into the path of a train says the city and the MTA have “recklessly” ignored the threat of subway shoves, according to a new lawsuit.
Joseph Lynskey, 46, filed the lawsuit over a year since his “miracle” survival after his notorious shoving in front of a speeding 1 train in Chelsea on New Years Eve 2024.
The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, says the agency and city had years to do more to prevent train strikes — and calls the fixed barriers recently installed at a handful of stations “a cheaper solution than full platform doors that automatically open.”
Lynskey suffered a fractured skull, broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and PTSD, but he’s not just after a payout: his lawsuit also takes aim at the alleged negligence of passenger safety.
The “horrific trail of dead bodies and ruined lives” won’t stop until the MTA and city are held “accountable for their negligence, gross negligence, and reckless conduct,” the lawsuit claims.
The Post previously reported on Lynskey’s lucky survival, but his lawsuit says what happened to him was no freak accident.
“The NYCTA/MTA, its engineers and its law department were aware based upon more than 15-20 years of their own internal statistics prior to the Plaintiff being pushed onto the tracks herein, that it was a moral certainty that innocent people, such as the Plaintiff, would be injured if they did not put in platform edge barriers or similar protections in their subway system,” the suit said.
Lynskey’s alleged shover, Kamel Hawkins was arrested later that day and faces a criminal trial on an attempted murder charge.
The new suit comes just months after a blockbuster $82M jury award for a woman who lost an arm and a leg in a similar shove, and also made claims about failures to install platform barriers.
At that trial, internal MTA documents from 2011 revealed that the transit agency was offered proposals to install platform doors at no cost in exchange for ad revenue.
Lynskey’s lawsuit claims the agency’s failure to install barriers were due to “political considerations and not safety considerations.”
The MTA declined to comment on the new lawsuit, but previously said full-sized barriers were “physically unfeasible” at most stations.
