Beware: This video of a man grossly fondling a woman on a New York City subway is extremely creepy and disturbing — almost as disturbing as someone recording him after they caught him in the act, according to many observers.
According to The Gothamist, Jasheem Smiley is the man who caught the alleged assailant on the number 4 train heading downtown in Manhattan. The creeper began trying to stick his hands up the crotch of a sleeping female passenger, oblivious to the sexual assault, and that’s when Jasheem intervened. He told the Gothamist:
“This guy gets on at 96th Street, and the look on his face was just so suspicious,” Smiley says of the man who sexually assaulted the woman. “He gave her a look like he knew her or something, and I turned the music off in my headphones to hear what was going on. When he started touching her that’s when I turned my camera on. My jaw dropped. I had never seen anything like this before.” Immediately after taking the footage, Smiley said he and another male passenger began shouting at the man to stop.
“We told him, ‘that’s not right!’ But he kept touching her, so I kicked her foot so she’d wake up, but she didn’t,” Smiley said. “Then he put his arm around her to try and pull her closer and that’s when she woke up. She gave him a look like, ‘who the hell are you?’ and punched him in the cheek…She punched him pretty hard.”
Smiley adds that the woman then exited the train at the next stop, and that she didn’t appear intoxicated or impaired when she walked away. He then found the conductor and showed her the video. “By the time she stopped the train at 14th Street, [the man] had gotten off, either at 23rd Street or 14th Street.” The conductor referred Smiley to the NYPD, who then put him in touch with an MTA detective…
Despite claiming to have tried to tell the man to stop, before the video was removed from Youtube, many commenters criticized Jasheem for not forcefully stopping the act instead of recording it. To that he responded:
“I didn’t just sit there I took charge after i got proof (video recording).”
I think I may have preferred he skip the proof part if I was the sleeping woman but if this creeper is ever caught, this footage will certainly come in handy. Check out the video here. Do you think Jasheem’s actions were in the right?
