A 60-year-old woman was struck more than 50 times with her own cane in a brutal early morning attack in a New York City subway station.
NYPD officials told the New York Post that the attack occurred just before 3:30 a.m. on Friday when the woman was walking at the West 116 Street and Lenox Avenue station.
The unidentified male lunged at the woman with an umbrella and she tried to fight him off with her cane, according to video footage obtained by the Post.
The assailant grabbed the woman's cane as she fell to the ground screaming and struck her more than 50 times in the head, stomach, leg, arms, back and hands. The force was so great that the cane, which was made of wood, fell apart during the attack.
Once on her back, the woman managed to pull the remains of her cane away from the man, who then started punching her in the head with his fist.
According to the Post, the man's pants began to fall down from the effort, as he continued to bludgeon and scream at the woman. The suspect kicked the motionless woman several more times before the video cut off.
While the NYPD said it responded to a 911 call about an attack at roughly 3:30 a.m., no subway workers, police or other riders intervened during the beating, according to the video footage, and the man fled before police arrived.
The woman, who reportedly did not know the man, was rushed to a local hospital, where she is believed to be in stable condition.
It is not clear how the altercation between the two began and NYPD officials said the investigation is ongoing.
Incidents of violence on the New York City subway have become frequent in recent months, with a train operator beaten by a man wielding a pipe and another subway rider stabbed by an unknown attacker over the last weekend in August.
In June, U.S. Marine veteran Daniel Penny, 24, pleaded not guilty to second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in the May chokehold death of Jordan Neely, who was behaving erratically on a subway train.
Neely was shouting and begging for money when Penny pinned him to the floor of the moving subway car with the help of two other passengers and held him in a chokehold for more than three minutes. The 30-year-old former Michael Jackson impersonator lost consciousness during the struggle and was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Penny, who served in the Marines for four years, has maintained that he acted to protect himself and others from Neely, who shouted "I'm gonna kill you."
"He was yelling in their faces saying these threats," Penny said in a video released by his attorneys. "I just couldn't sit still."