A woman in Oregon faces several criminal charges for pushing a three-year-old child on to railway tracks in an unprovoked attack.
Surveillance video of the incident last week showed a mother and her child waiting on a railway platform at a station in northeast Portland, when the woman lunged from a seat behind them, shoving the girl on to the track.
The child landed face-first on the tracks but was swiftly rescued and suffered only minor injuries. One witness said they had seen the “little girl flying on to the tracks” and her head bounce off the metal rail.
“I don’t understand why someone would do something like that,” another witness told the NBC15 television station.
The attacker has been named as Brianna Workman, 32. The Multnomah county district attorney’s office said that she was held without bail and charged with assault, reckless endangerment, interfering with public transportation and disorderly conduct. She will appear in court on January 9.
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Police said Workman had a string of convictions and arrests, along with a history of drug addiction. Court documents suggest she is homeless.
Workman was convicted of heroin possession in 2013 and has had several of encounters with the police since then. In 2021 she was arrested after slashing a man with a knife. Local reports said she had claimed in court documents that she “had a mental breakdown” and “blacked out” at the time of the stabbing. The case was eventually dismissed.