The Queens straphanger brutally beaten by a homeless man in a shocking caught-on-video attack may lose sight in her right eye — and is now desperately pleading for more cops in the transit system.
Elizabeth Gomes, 33, was dragged across the Howard Beach-JFK Airport station last Tuesday morning before being repeatedly kicked and punched in the face by Waheed Foster, a 41-year-old vagrant who was once convicted of beating his grandmother to death, according to police.
Gomes had gotten off the A train and was on her way to Kennedy Airport where she works as a security guard before the sickening 5:15 a.m. assault. She was trying to avoid Foster, but he targeted her.
The attack sent her to Jamaica Hospital with a serious eye injury, and her vision on her right side may be permanently lost, her husband told The Post on Tuesday.
“It’s crazy, she’s going to lose her sight if she doesn’t get some help real soon. Her pupil was outside her eye. Her eye!,” Clement Tucker, 41, said.
Tucker and Gomes, who have three children together and five children in total between them, were headed Tuesday to Queens Criminal Court, where a grand jury was set to hear the evidence against Foster, Tucker said.
“I can’t see anything on my right side, honestly. And it just hurts,” Gomes told ABC 7 earlier through tears, adding that her head throbs with pain and she has barely slept in the week since the attack.
Gomes exasperatedly asked where all the police were.
“Every day is an incident in the subway,” she told the outlet. “What happened to all these police officer [sic] they said they will have there to protect us? There’s like nobody to be found. I don’t understand.”
Straphangers are 42% more likely to be victims of violent crime now than before the pandemic started, according to NYPD data which showed there were 2.14 crimes per million riders last month compared to 1.5 crimes per million riders in August of 2019.
Police officials last week touted lower overall crime numbers in the system without taking into consideration the lower ridership caused by COVID-19 — and blamed the media for the perception that crime on the rails was on the ride.
In June, Mayor ERic Adams said he was increasing police presence in the subway and putting officers back on solo patrols, which were abandoned after the 2014 assassinations of two officers.
One man tried to come to Gomes’ aid but was scared off by the menacing brute, the footage showed.
Foster was charged with assault and held without bail, but Gomes told the outlet she wished there was an officer in the station to prevent the attack in the first place.
Foster beat his 82-year-old foster grandmother to death in an argument over money in 1995 when he was just 14, sources told The Post. In 2010, he stabbed a woman in the face at a mental institution and has also been arrested for assaulting a woman with a screwdriver, criminal mischief, robbery and larceny, the law enforcement sources said. He was on parole at the time of last week’s attack.
