Man charged in Midtown bottle attacks also arrested in subway assault
MIDTOWN, Manhattan (WABC) -- A 33-year-old man is charged with randomly hitting three people in the head with a glass bottle in Midtown Thursday night. He was also charged in a fourth attack, an unsolved subway assault that happened back in August.
Police say suspect Michael Howell first struck a 23-year-old man in the head with the bottle outside Whole Foods at 1095 Sixth Avenue at around 6:40 p.m.
He then went inside, according to the complaint, and struck a 49-year-old woman in the head with a bottle on the second floor of the store.
About an hour later, police received a report that he had struck a 55-year-old woman in the head with a glass bottle on a northbound D train, just north of the store.
Officers responded to the subway station at Sixth Avenue and West 46th Street to take a report and discovered Howell still hanging around the station.
He was charged with three counts of felony assault for Thursday night's attacks.
The 49-year-old victim who was on the second floor of the Whole Foods spoke exclusively to Eyewitness News on Friday. She asked not to be identified.
"In that moment, when I had the blow to the back of my head, and in that moment I just remember, let go, let go," she said. "And when I said that, I knew in that moment that I had to prepare to die."
She had to get a staple in her head, her ear glued back together and had minor cuts all over her body from shards of glass.
"You know, I remembered a lot of love around me, a lot of hands around me, I remember being very scared," she said. "I remember thinking that my face might be gone, I might have, I might die, because I knew it was in my head. I remember trying to be to tell myself that this might, you might bleed out."
She said the first thing that came to her mind was that she had been shot or a chandelier fell on her. She said the fact that Howell was arrested doesn't solve the problem.
"Yeah, I mean, to me, I feel like it breaks my heart that someone is in so much pain that they would want to hurt you," she said. "And it makes me wonder, why aren't why the system has failed us as a whole."
Howell was also charged in an open assault complaint from August when he allegedly punched another subway rider on a southbound A train at 42 St - Port Authority Bus Terminal station.
He has prior arrests that include three incidents of petit larceny on August 11, August 15, and August 24, when he allegedly stole merchandise from TJ Maxx and Nordstrom stores.
Howell also has a prior driving while intoxicated arrest in 2014.
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