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Cops: teens in custody after subway attack

Thursday, February 16, 2006

(Chinatown -WABC, February 16, 2006) (WABC) -- There are new developments in the subway attack in Chinatown that put a man in a coma. Suspects are now in custody and police say an Eyewitness News viewer helped get the job done.

For more we go live to Eyewitness News reporter N.J. Burkett in Lower Manhattan who has some exclusive information.

Three teenagers are being questioned at this hour in that brutal assault in Chinatown. That beating left a middle-aged man in a coma for nine days.

Police have just confirmed to us that the break came after surveillance photographs were broadcast on Eyewitness News at noon today. A viewer called the station, one of our editors put the man through to detectives here at the 7th Precinct. That man was one of a number of neighbors who said the suspects looked familair.

Lori Sola, Eyewitness: "He looks familair, like he lives around here."

Lori Sola took one look at the surveillance pictures today and it all came back. Three teenages demanding money, she said, from a middle-aged man outside a check cashing firm in Chinatown.

Lori Sola, Eyewitness: "I was walking behind them, someone said 'give me your money,' we laughed, we thought they were joking. When we got around here they pushed the guy. The guy started moving over here, around and down the steps. I don't know if he got pushed or kicked."

The beating ended, she said, when one of the suspects shoved the man down a subway staircase. The man remained in a coma for nine days. Police released surveillance pictures and this afternoon a telephone tip from a viewer of Eyewitness News at noon led detectives to the homes of three young men. One of them is 16-year-old Rodney Hopkins.

Michelle Cox is the young man's mother.

Michelle Cox, Suspect's Mother: "There are two sides to every story and I need to know both sides of the story. I hear one side, I'm not going by one side. I'm going by what my son told me, which was that he didn't have nothing to do with the man falling down."

It all happened last Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. The victim was identified as 45-year-old Gary Schultz. He is listed in critical condition at Bellevue Hospital.

Those three teens are being questioned as suspects in this case. Charges have not been filed but arrests, it would appear, are imminent.

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