For days after Emine Yilmaz Ozsoy was thrown into a speeding subway train on her way to work, she remained in intensive care at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. She underwent two surgeries, her body so violently battered that she was under constant surveillance for fear that her traumatized arteries would fail.
On Thursday, Ms. Ozsoy remained partially paralyzed but was gathering her strength, testing her remaining mobility and aware of everything that had happened to her since early Sunday morning when a man stuck her head in the train as it was leaving Lexington Avenue. 63rd street station.
“Right now her journey is a very scary journey,” her husband, Ferdi Ozsoy, said in an interview.
Since moving from Istanbul in 2017, Ms Ozsoy, 35, has embodied New York’s “hustler” spirit, said a cousin, Deniz Gunduz. She had left her career as a page designer at one of Turkey’s most influential newspapers to follow a more creative path. In New York, she embarked on a career as an artist and illustrator, simultaneously learning English and getting a job as a barista. She is focused, driven and unflinchingly independent, her relatives said.
Now suddenly vulnerable, Ms. Ozsoy is at the center of concentric rings of care: nurses and doctors watching over her in the intensive care unit; her husband and her cousin, who are go-betweens with everyone associated with her; friends arriving with food and hugs. Beyond those inner circles are New York City residents for whom she embodies a lingering fear of such violence, and her story crystallizes the endemic problem of security underground.
Authorities have said the attack on Ms Ozsoy was carried out by Kamal Semrade, 39, who was arrested Monday night at a homeless shelter near LaGuardia Airport in Queens on charges of attempted of murder and held without bail. His attorney, Rebecca Heinsen, said in a statement that her client should be given the presumption of innocence and warned not to jump to conclusions about him.
The chance of being a victim of a violent crime on the subway is statistically low, but for no discernible motive, the seemingly random attack revived fears about an unsafe underground city.
Inside the hospital, however, there is only one focus: Mrs. Ozsoy.
On Sunday, he underwent a marathon of medical treatment that lasted more than 12 hours. She had an MRI and CT scan, then was rushed into surgery after it was discovered that she had a broken neck, Gunduz said.
She suffered a “fracture of the cervical spine, broken fingers, a scalp laceration and damage to four major blood vessels,” prosecutor Carolyn McGuigan said at Mr. Semrade’s arraignment.
On Monday morning, Ms. Ozsoy was able to fully raise one arm, faster than the doctors had anticipated. By Thursday, her husband said, she was able to raise both arms, although she could not move her hands and her legs remained paralyzed. The battery of machines that she had held her to had been reduced to an IV drip.
Family and friends have stayed by Ms. Ozsoy’s bedside day and night. Only two people at a time can sit with her in the hospital room, so others wait in a family room filled with food left by visitors. Mr. Ozsoy or Mr. Gunduz have had to meet supporters outside the hospital to give them updates on Ms. Ozsoy’s condition. Her colleagues also started an online fundraiser for the family’s expenses.
Sitting in the back of a Matto Espresso on Second Avenue in Manhattan, where Ms. Ozsoy was scheduled to work the day she was attacked, Wednesday, Mr. Ozsoy and Mr. Gunduz grappled with the casual nature of the attack and worried about the future of their loved one. “What is Emine going to do now?” asked Mr. Gunduz.
Ms. Ozsoy had been building her community and her life in New York, family and friends said. An avid artist, she would take her iPad to the parks and draw for hours. Her work has been featured in various magazines and she has worked with clients such as Airbnb, Puma, Chicago Magazine and the Maroon 5 band, Mr. Ozsoy. wrote in a statement.
The “sweetest person you’ll ever meet,” Ms Ozsoy was quiet and observant, her husband said. Art was the way she expressed herself: her vibrant illustrations captured people reading in parks and walking through the city. She was also making progress in the cafe, as she had just been told that she would be promoted to supervisor.
The Ozsoys met in Turkey in 2011 and married in 2014, Ozsoy said. A native of New York, he said that he had told him before moving to the United States that New York would be a place to live his dreams. Although they decided to separate, he said, they remain “partners in life.”
Ozsoy lives near Tampa, Florida, but they talked often and met for dinner in New York a week before his attack. Mr. Ozsoy said that he could see that she was thriving in the new life that she was building.
“She felt that and was able to live through that,” he said. “Until Sunday.”
On that day, Ms. Ozsoy entered a transportation system that has struggled since the pandemic emptied it of passengers. The subway is the economic soul of the city and its condition defines the general well-being of New York.
During the long lockdown, passenger numbers dropped and people worried about crime in the depopulated system. Mayor Eric Adams has laid out programs he said are meant to help make subways safer, with plans to flood them with police and mental health workers, and to get more than 1,000 homeless people out.
But even as overall crime in the system has declined in recent months, violent aberrations have persisted: an unprovoked murder on the Q train, a mass shooting on the R in Brooklyn, the fatal asphyxiation of a homeless man this month at the f train
The attack on Ms. Ozsoy occupied a particular niche in New Yorkers’ fears: the sudden jolt as an unstoppable train moves forward.
In a case that shocked the city in 2022, Michelle Alyssa Go, who worked in mergers and acquisitions, left her Upper West Side apartment and was on a subway platform in Times Square when a 61-year-old man pushed her from behind. , pushing her. her to her death in front of a southbound train. The man police said he pushed her, Martial Simon, was found unfit to stand trial and was held indefinitely in a closed psychiatric facility.
On Sunday, Ms. Ozsoy was on her way to work when she boarded a train in Queens near her home in Jackson Heights. Semrade boarded the same train at the station, police said. Both got off at Lexington Avenue/63rd Street around 6 am, authorities said.
As a train was leaving, Mr. Semrade approached Ms. Ozsoy from behind, grabbed her head with both hands and pushed her “with all his force into the moving subway car,” said Ms. McGuigan, the prosecutor, at Mr. Semrade’s house. accusation. She “she hit the train in the face and head, rolled off it and then crashed onto the platform where she was instantly paralyzed.” she said.
At 6:04 a.m., Eli Naim, Ms Ozsoy’s boss, who oversees the Matto Espresso chain of coffee shops, received a call from her number. But when he answered, Ms. Ozsoy wasn’t the one on the line.
A woman she did not know told her that there had been an accident on the subway and that Mrs Ozsoy was injured, she said. She could hear Mrs. Ozsoy in the background telling someone to “call Eli.”
In Florida, Mr. Ozsoy received a call from a police officer after the attack, informing him that his wife was in the hospital, but he was not told about the severity of her injuries. Shortly thereafter, he received another call, he said, this time from a doctor who told him that Ms. Ozsoy had appointed him as her medical representative before the surgery.
“That’s when I called Deniz,” Ozsoy said. “I told her, ‘Deniz, I’m not in New York, please go to her.'”
Through it all, Mr. Gunduz has been updating his parents and four siblings in Turkey on his condition as they seek passports and emergency visas to come to New York.
For the family, the attack on Ms. Ozsoy was a personal and intimate blow.
“We never thought it was going to happen to us,” Ozsoy said. All New Yorkers, he added, should contemplate the violence that had occurred and what it meant to the city.
“Those subway stations are not only there to take a person from one place to another, they are arteries of the city,” he said, adding: “If we are not safe in these arteries, where are we going to be? sure?”