The mother of an 11-year-old girl who was attacked by a stranger with a box cutter on an East Harlem street was hellbent on catching the man even as he tried to get away on a subway train, the angry mom told the Daily News.
Malgorzata Sladek was walking through East Harlem with her daughter Maxi on Friday afternoon when Shaquan Cummings allegedly stormed up and struck the child with a box cutter, cutting through her long black hair and slashing the back of the pre-teen’s head.
To Sladek, the sound of blade hitting bone was deafening.
“It sounded like he punched her in the head,” Sladek, 46, told the Daily News Saturday. “I didn’t know it was a knife until I turn around and I see her hair laying on the floor and the blood pouring. Blood like coming out of a sink. I thought she was going to bleed to death.”
That’s when police say Cummings, who Sladek and her daughter had never seen before, turned towards the panicked mom.
“He looked at me and he was coming towards me,” she recalled. “I wasn’t sure if he was going to stab me or what was going to happen.”
A moment later, the stranger ran off to a No. 6 subway station near E.116th St. and Lexington Ave. But Sladek wasn’t going to let him get away with harming her baby.
“I just went and chased after him,” she recalled. “I didn’t care. I had bags with me. I said, ‘I’m chasing after him. I won’t let him get away.’”
Cummings ran into the station, chucking the bloody box cutter onto the tracks, cops said. Sladek saw him attempt to get on an awaiting train and began yelling after him.
“I started screaming, ‘Stop the train! Stop the train!’ And the conductor stopped the train,” she recalled.
With the train not moving, Cummings jumped down onto the tracks, crossed to the other platform and headed back to the street, where he was met by an angry mob of witnesses.
More than a dozen people converged on Cummings when he returned to the street, according to a video shared with the Daily News. The would-be slasher cowered in a doorway as four cops encircled him, preventing the angry mob from laying hands on him.
One of the angry witnesses poked at Cummings with a gray medical cane as cops held the mob back, the video shows.
“I came out of the train and at that point I saw him being mobbed by police and by people,” Sladek recalled.
Cops recovered the box cutter from the tracks and charged Cummings with assault, endangering the welfare of a child and weapons possession. Cummings was ordered held without bail at his Saturday court arraignment.
Cummings lives in supportive housing in the Bronx, about 3 miles from where the attack took place. Cummings was arguing with another adult before he suddenly turned and attacked Maxi, but it was unclear why he attacked the child, a police source with knowledge of the case said.
Mario Barber, an MTA worker at the station, saw Cummings dashing across the tracks.
“The third rail sparked,” Barber recalled. “He just said people were trying to chase him and beat him up. But he seemed kind of delusional, belligerent.”
Maxi, her hair caked in blood, was taken to Harlem Hospital, where she needed both stitches and staples to close the gnarly wound.
“She had surgery on her head,” the outraged mom said. “He sliced her head from top to bottom in the back. It was like her whole head was separated.”
Maxi was off from school Friday and she and her mom were out shopping when the attack took place.
“We decided, ‘Oh, we’re gonna go do some shopping and spend time together’ and it was a normal day for us,” Sladek said.
Then the unimaginable happened.
“It took one second and our life changed,” Sladek said. “Somebody comes from behind as you walk on the sidewalk thinking nothing of it and slices her head in half.”
The bloody attack has completely traumatized Maxi, who used to love to be outside and go on shopping trips, the heartbroken mom said.
“She said she doesn’t want to go back to school. She said she doesn’t want to go outside, walk outside,” said Sladek who lives in Brooklyn. “She says, ‘Mommy, I’m not going anywhere. Please don’t let me out of the house. I don’t want to go outside.’
“She could have been dead,” Sladek said, hoping Cummings goes to prison for the random attack. “[She’s] lucky she’s alive. If they let him out, you don’t know what he can do to another person.
“What happens if he stabs another person and they end up being dead?”
