Woman shoved onto subway tracks during robbery: cops

A stranger shoved a 68-year-old grandmother onto the subway tracks at a Manhattan subway station this week in a violent attack that her daughter is considering a hate crime.

Zvezdana Drazila, a housekeeper who works in Manhattan but lives in Ridgewood, Queens, was on her way home from work, on the southbound L platform of the 14th Street-6th Avenue station in Greenwich Village, at around 2:10 p.m. Monday when a man pushed her, according to cops and her daughter, who only gave her nickname, Dana.

The shove caused Drazila to fall to the platform, and then roll down, onto the track bed, cops said.

“She says she saw the man go past her, but she didn’t think anything of it, and then she felt somebody push her to the ground and then he kept kicking her and stomping on her as she held onto the pillar,” Dana said. “He was kicking her with the intention to push her onto the tracks. And when she finally couldn’t hold on — she is 68 years old — she let go, and he shoved her into the tracks.”

“She fell, she hit her head on the tracks,” her daughter added. “Luckily she didn’t fall far enough to be electrocuted, luckily the train didn’t come….people were nearby when they heard her screaming and pulled her up.”

Cops say that Drazila’s attacker snatched her cell phone, which she had dropped onto the platform.

But Dana says the family tracked her mother’s phone to the subway station and police recovered it Wednesday.

“The reason why the police report [that it was a robbery]… is because they reported what they knew at the time,” Dana said. “My mother was just attacked, she couldn’t give them all the details.”

Cops re-interviewed Drazila Wednesday night and asked her if her attacker said anything.

“She said, ‘Yeah, he was saying something, but it didn’t make any sense. He said something like cracker, or something like that,’” Dana said, adding that her mother didn’t know what the word meant. “And that’s when one of the detectives was like, ‘Hold on a second, this was a hate crime.’”

“So he didn’t take the phone, he didn’t take her wallet, he didn’t take her bag,” she added. “He didn’t take anything from her. Being that he called her a cracker as he was attacking her, now we’re thinking it was just because she was white.”

Cops could not confirm Thursday afternoon that the suspect used the derogatory term.

Drazila was rushed to NYC Health & Hospitals/Bellevue, where she stayed for two nights, according to her daughter. On Thursday afternoon, she was resting at home with five broken bones in her spine, a broken rib and a large bump on her head.

Drazila came to the US from Serbia in the 1960s, and she is a mother of five and a grandmother of 11, her daughter said.

“She’s afraid to leave the house, she’s afraid to go anywhere,” Dana said. “How is she supposed to go back to work?”

Still, she is grateful for two good Samaritans who saved her life.

“She just said thank God for those people,” her daughter said. “She wishes she knew who they were to personally thank them because if it wasn’t for them, she could have been killed. She said there was a little indent there where she put her foot, but she couldn’t get out on her own. These two people grabbed her by her hands and pulled her up.”

Dana thanked the NYPD for their work on the case.

“One of [the cops] was by my mom’s side the whole time,” she said. “He even called us later just to see how she’s doing. At the crime scene, there were about eight of them looking for this guy.”

“They’re in constant contact with my brother, with my sister, with my mother and they’re working very, very hard,” she added. “I feel that’s not mentioned enough. We’re disappointed in the system, we’re disappointed in the mayor, [the cops] deserve more credit. They just showed that even though they got defunded, they’re working their butts off to catch this guy.”

Cops say Drazila’s attacker is between 40 and 50 years old, last seen wearing all dark clothing.

He’s shown on surveillance video jumping over a turnstile barefoot.