New York Post

By KIRSTAN CONLEY, LARRY CELONA, ANTONIO ANTENUCCI, CHRISTINA CARREGA and JEANE MacINTOSH, December 5, 2012

A 30-year-old man confessed today to being the subway psycho who “launched” an innocent straphanger into tracks, where he was killed by an oncoming Q train, law enforcement sources told The Post.

The suspect, Naeem Davis, was being questioned today in Manhattan, in connection to the grisly death of Ki Suk Han, 58, yesterday afternoon. The man was picked up on 50th Street near Seventh Avenue by a transit police captain, who was on a coffee break at 1:30 p.m. and ran over to grab him.



The attacker, who had been menacing others in the station, looms over his victim after pushing him on the tracks. He has confessed to shoving Han.

Han, of Elmherst, Queens, desperately tried to scramble back to the platform as onlookers screamed, shouted and frantically waved their hands and bags in a bid to get the downtown Q train to stop at around 12:30 p.m.

The man being questioned by cops was identified as a 30-year-old street vendor from Queens, according to law enforcement sources.

Post freelance photographer R. Umar Abbasi — who had been waiting on the platform of the 49th Street station — ran toward the train, repeatedly firing off his flash to warn the operator.

“I just started running, running, hoping that the driver could see my flash,” said Abbasi, whose camera captured chilling shots of Suk’s tragic fight for his life.

The train slowed, but a dazed and bruised Han still wound up hopelessly caught between it and the platform as it came to a halt.

A shaken Abbasi said the train “crushed him like a rag doll.”

“It's one of those great tragedies, it's a blot on all of us,” Mayor Bloomberg said today. “And if you could do anything to stop it, you would. But the good news is it happens phenomenally rarely.”

Dr. Laura Kaplan, a second-year resident at Beth Israel Medical Center who was also on the platform, sprang into action, taking off her coat, grabbing her stethoscope and rushing over to try an administer CPR with the help of a nearby security guard.

“It was terrifying, but you run on adrenaline,” Kaplan told The Post. “There was no pulse, never, no reflexes.”

“I heard what I thought were heart sounds,” she added. “We started compressions, which is half of CPR. We were unable to perform rescue breathing [the other half of CPR] because there was blood coming out of his mouth. He wasn’t in the right position [for full CPR] and there was just no way to get him out of there.

Accused killer Naeem Davis, with a chilling, dead-eye stare yesterday, was hit with murder charges for tossing a Queens dad into the path of a subway train in Midtown, authorities said.


Hours earlier, Davis had asked for a cigarette and a copy of The Post when he woke up in the Midtown North Precinct so he could read about his infamy, law enforcement sources said.

He was refused, but later spotted a copy of the paper on a chair as he was being moved around the station house. “Look, I’m on the front page of The Post,” he said. “Can I get that paper?”

He seemed “very calm, not crazy,” said a source.

Later, at his arraignment, he appeared tired and stoic.

He pleaded not guilty and was ordered held without bail.

Assistant District Attorney James Lin told the judge that Davis watched the train strike Han before calmly gathering his jacket and coffee cup and leaving the 49th Street station.

“The defendant never once offered any aid to the victim as the train approached the platform, and, in fact, this defendant watched the train hit the victim,” Lin said.

But Davis’ Legal Aid lawyer, Stephen Pokart, said Han was the aggressor. Outside court, Pokart cited reports that Han had been “drunk and angry.”

One witness had picked Davis out of a lineup at the station house, where the suspect scarfed down several sandwiches, sources said.

Davis told cops that Han was harassing him on the platform Monday afternoon, saying they had bumped into each other before going through the turnstile, sparking an argument.

After Davis allegedly shoved Han onto the tracks, Han tried desperately, but in vain, to climb back up to the platform.

Davis, who came to the United States from Sierra Leone when he was 7 years old, shaved his dreadlocks to alter his appearance after the subway violence.

But his freedom was short-lived. He was busted Tuesday afternoon by an NYPD transit captain who recognized him.

The arrest capped a lengthy rap sheet for Davis, who was a career criminal in Pennsylvania before arriving here.

He was convicted more than a dozen times in that state, for burglary, receiving stolen property and breaking into vehicles, according to records obtained by The Post.

In 2002, he was arrested for stealing three Dell laptops from parked police cars and trying to sell them at local electronics stores for quick cash, the records show. He served two years.

Those heists came months after he was busted trying to pull two jobs on the same day.

At the first location, he pulled a hard drive off a man’s computer and also took a Sony headset and a Yahtzee game CD-ROM.

Later that day, he tried to steal a teenager’s PlayStation and several other electronics from a home.

He fled that crime scene in a rush, but left behind a broken basement window, a pack of smokes and an open Web browser on a home computer, where he had been viewing porn.

Davis’ acquaintances around Times Square, where he worker in a series of odd jobs, said yesterday he is a calm, hardworking man who got along with almost everyone.

Hell’s Kitchen T-shirt vendor Cheikh Diakhate, 54, said he sent his kids — a boy, 10, and a girl, 12 — to the park with the suspect. Davis didn’t get paid for spending time with Diakhate’s kids, and they never complained about the man.

“They liked him,” Diakhate said. “When I told them they caught him, they were crying.

“He’d buy them ice cream; sometimes it was his last five bucks. He was so nice to my kids. I never think . . . he could do this. I never saw him angry.”