The daughter of a 60-year-old woman who was beaten with her own cane in a disturbing, caught-on-camera assault in Harlem said she’s angry that nobody came to help her defenseless mom — as cops identified her alleged attacker as a 43-year-old man with at least nine prior arrests.
Laurell Reynolds, 60, of the Bronx was walking through the West 116 Street and Lenox Avenue station at about 3:30 a.m. Friday when Norton Blake allegedly stripped her cane from her and beat her with it, according to NYPD officials and a disturbing two-minute recording of the crime.
Nobody stepped in to help Reynolds — even as the creep struck her so hard and so often that her wooden cane shattered.
“I’m hurt — it hurts,” her daughter, Lashanne Reese, 41, of the Bronx, told The Post on Tuesday. “That man could’ve killed my mother … You all did nothing. I have a problem with that.”
Reese, who works at Crisis Management System/Bronx Community Justice Center, said her mom’s attacker needs to go to jail and that he shouldn’t have been on the streets in the first place.
“He needs help — no, he shouldn’t be on the street,” she said as she broke down in tears. “He just attacked my mother and beat her with a cane. He don’t belong on the street.”
NYPD Chief of Transit Michael Kemper, who named Blake as the suspect during an unrelated press conference Tuesday, said cops were nearing an arrest.
“We’re looking for him, and I’m pretty confident that in short order, he will be arrested and charged for that assault on that female,” Kemper told reporters.
The suspect and Reynolds had engaged in some kind of argument as the victim walked up the subway station steps, Kemper said.
“A witness [said] they were arguing over something that might have dropped,” Kemper said, adding that it wasn’t clear if the two knew each other. “He might have been helping her carry something up the steps and something might have dropped, causing them to argue.”
The dispute quickly spiraled into a physical assault, with Blake allegedly hitting Reynolds more than 50 times in the head, stomach, leg, arms, back and hands as she fell to the ground.
Blake has nine prior arrests for crimes such as drug possession, assault, trespassing, resisting arrest, tampering with evidence and possessing stolen property, law enforcement sources told The Post.
Both of his assaults were for attacks on cops — he allegedly fought an officer while resisting arrest in 2017 and punched an off-duty cop in the face in 2003, sources said.
Her mom had left Reese’s home in the Bronx to go home and change, then was supposed to return for a party her daughter was having.
Reese had been wondering why her mom never made it back.
“Now I know,” she said.
The unidentified person who recorded the shocking video of the beating appears to be standing inside a subway toll booth, but it’s not clear if it was an MTA worker.
The agency trains its people to deal with crime or safety-related situations, MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said Tuesday. And they’ve been instructed to call both the NYPD and the Rail Control Center if there’s trouble.
But he also said he didn’t “know about the specifics of what took place in this specific episode” and wasn’t sure who filmed the incident instead of helping Reynolds.
“We’re supposed to be a loving, caring community. It’s unity in community — if we put unity in, we get a whole community,” Reese said.
“For them not to do that … this is why it’s going on everywhere,” she continued. “Everywhere this is happening because there is no unity in our community.”
Reese said she wasn’t sure why her mom went to Harlem, where she once lived.
She’s tried to talk her mom out of taking the train at night. But it hasn’t taken.
“She’s stubborn,” Reese said. “You know older people get a little stubborn.”
Additional reporting by Amanda Woods and Nolan Hicks
