Two years ago a stranger sucker punched me in the ribs as I walked to work, and I became another one of the countless New Yorkers doubly victimized by a violent criminal and a broken justice system.
The bruise went away in a few days. But the fear and feeling of helplessness — foreign to me as The Post’s police bureau chief — lingered.
Over the last few weeks, as I learned a lot more about the man who attacked me for no other reason than he could, I felt a new emotion: anger.
Cops have identified the suspect in my attack as Kamieo Caines, 36, a hulking homeless man with 20 prior arrests for violent crimes, including assault and weapon possession, according to police sources. He has spent time in prison and was on parole when he attacked me, I was told.
He’s done this many times before — and as unbelievable as it seems — is free as I write this.
He was convicted in 2019 in the bloody attack on two men with a box cutter during the evening rush inside the Fulton Street subway station in Manhattan on Dec. 17, 2017.
The slashing happened about six blocks from where he punched me.
Despite his proven record of violence, Caines was discharged from Collins Correctional Facility in Erie County on Jan. 18, 2022. His parole ends on April 29, 2025.
Just 18 months after he was freed, he slugged me out of the blue as I walked down Chambers Street on the morning of Aug. 8, 2023 — just a few blocks from NYPD headquarters, where I work.
The blow from the 6-foot-3, 280-pound Caines sent me staggering backwards, knocked the wind from me and left me gasping for air.
“That man just hit me!” I yelled as I watched my assailant move quickly down the sidewalk. “He hit me!”
I was shaken and terrified.
Caines, known in the area for loitering, was last seen darting down the same 2/3 subway station on Chambers that I had exited minutes before the attack.
Investigators found a video of him entering the station and were able to get a positive hit on him with facial recognition technology, police sources told me at the time. They did not tell me his name back then because they worried it would snarl any case against him, I was told.
Eighteen months later, Caines is still running free. The statute of limitations runs out in my case on Aug. 8.
Even though I did everything I could to help cops catch him — shouting for help, taking pictures as he fled, flagging down an officer, reporting the crime, and helping police identify the suspect — my case went nowhere, one of so many lost in the system’s failure to act on common sense.
The problem was my inability to pick Caines out of a photo line-up more than a month after my assault, police told me.
A little research taught me it is not that simple, however, and a victim’s inability to pick out a suspect in a photo array does not automatically kill a case. Police told me they have a probable cause warrant to arrest Caines, are looking for him in the city’s shelter system and will arrest him if they find him.
I felt some relief at the time that the creep hadn’t socked me in the face or used a weapon against me. His subway victims in 2017 weren’t as fortunate.
The first victim needed staples and stitches to close the cuts on his face and head, and the second suffered a deep gash to his neck “that came within centimeters of his artery,” according to a Manhattan District Attorney’s Office criminal complaint.
“I walked into a melee,” victim Chris Smith, who said his neck was cut all the way across, told The Post.
“I came in through the turnstile,” the 41-year-old construction worker recalled. “I saw a guy I know in a fight. … When you work construction and you see a guy everyday it’s just natural to react to say ‘What’s going on?’”
Smith jumped in to help his coworker, and punches were thrown, he said. When the dust settled, Smith knew he had been cut, but said he didn’t realize how badly. He just knew he was bleeding.
Suddenly, there was “a sea of cops” in the station, he said.
“They were holding my neck,” he said.
Police immediately posted photos of Caines on X and he was arrested two days later by a cop who saw him selling subway swipes at the South Ferry subway station, according to police.
Caines pushed an officer who tried to arrest him and ran, the criminal complaint states. Police caught up to him and used pepper spray to subdue him, a source said.
During the arrest, cops found four gate keys, which allow access to the transit system, and 16 bent Metrocards, which can also be used for free access.
Once he was locked up at the NYPD’s Transit District 2 in Lower Manhattan, he “punched the light inside the cell and ripped it off,” according to cops.
Prosecutors charged him with two counts of assault, possession of burglar’s tools, criminal mischief, petty larceny and criminal possession of a forged instrument. But he was only convicted of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon and sentenced to two-to-four years in state prison.
Retired NYPD Sgt. Joseph Giacalone, a criminal justice professor at Penn State, told me a criminal’s past behavior matters.
“They need to locate him and put him back in prison because that’s where he belongs,” Giacalone said. “In order to determine the future behavior of criminals, just take a look at their past.”
Caines is currently listed as a parole absconder by the state. An arrest would send him back to prison and remove him from the Big Apple’s streets.
The NYPD warrants squad is actively searching for him. But at this rate, I have no faith that he will ever be locked up. And that makes me afraid for his future victims — and angry with a justice system that allows it.
