An epileptic Bronx woman dubbed “one of the first human cyborgs” was sucker-punched Wednesday morning as she was exiting a Midtown subway station, police sources said Thursday.
The victim, Emily Borghard, 28, had just gotten off the 7 train at the Grand Central-42nd Street subway station and took the escalator to the mezzanine level when she was socked in the left side of her face by 28-year-old career criminal Deaja Hardy at around 6:05 a.m., sources said.
Borghard, who suffered redness and swelling to her face from the blow, quickly flagged down transit officers who arrested Hardy at the scene.
“With what I’ve been through getting hit in the face is not a good thing,” Borghard, a member of the famed subway vigilante group The Guardian Angels, told The Post Wednesday.
Borghard has a computer chip implanted in her brain as a means to prevent chronic seizures, making her “one of the first human cyborgs,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
During the time that Borghard went undiagnosed, she suffered hundreds of seizures a day.
“I was not functioning. I could not recall day to day events and every time I had an episode it was like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat—my memory of it was gone,” Borghard told Reader’s Digest in an interview last month.
Borghard had her first terrifying experience with a seizure in 2005 when one occurred while she was driving a car, causing her to drive off the road and plunge into a creek in upstate New York where she grew up.
“I was lucky that someone saw it happen because if not, they might not have known I was in the creek,” Borghard told Reader’s Digest.
Borghard says she has no memory of the event and only knows what happened through police reports and what she has been told.
Doctors eventually planted the neuro-stimulating chip inside her head – and today she’s nearly seizure-free.
“It gives it a little zap to the brain to get it to stop what it’s doing and shock it back into normal rhythm,” Borghard told the Wall Street Journal in a podcast interview in May.
Borghard recently graduated with her masters from Fordham University in clinical social work and before that spent three years in the south of France teaching at inner city schools.
“If you would have asked me if any of this would have been possible I would have laughed,” Borghard told the Wall Street Journal.
Despite her condition, Borghard refused medical treatment at the scene of Wednesday’s assault, according to police.
Hardy, her attacker, has 22 prior arrests on his record, including one on Feb. 21, 2013 for assaulting a 75-year-old man in Midtown while the victim was eating breakfast, sources said.
In that instance, Hardy whacked the elderly man in the head multiple times with the victim’s own set of keys at an office building on West 37th Street when Hardy entered the building and was told he couldn’t come in, sources said.
The 75-year-old man suffered a laceration to his head.
At Hardy’s Manhattan Criminal Court arraignment for the attack on Borghard, he was released without bail.
His next court date is on Sept. 11.