The Teddy Bear Was A Nice Touch But It Won’t Fool A Jury

Please secure the power tools:

“He was trying to cut through me and he never stopped!” a terrified straphanger recalled from his hospital bed yesterday after a berserk ex-con — armed with a power saw in each hand — carved him up on an Upper West Side subway platform.

“He looked at me, and before I know it, he was attacking me. The motor kept going on and he was trying to cut through me and he never stopped — for two, three four times, he never stopped,” said critically wounded Michael Steinberg.

The 64-year-old postal worker suffered a deep slice across his abdomen, as well as a punctured lung and broken rib.

The bizarre 3:30 a.m. attack began when suspect Tareyton Williams, 33, of The Bronx, grabbed two cordless saws that had been left unattended on the train platform by private contractors hired by the MTA. He menaced riders and track workers on the southbound platform at Broadway’s 110th Street station.

Williams, who witnesses said had been carrying a teddy bear after the attack, was shadow-boxing with the deadly saws when he took a swipe at a rider standing on the platform, but missed, police said.

The wild-eyed suspect’s next target was Steinberg.

“I saw this guy with a hacksaw, or whatever the hell it was, running towards them [track workers]. They ran away,” Steinberg said.

He had been running late getting to his downtown job, because he’d been tending to his sickly wife, when all hell broke loose as he went onto the platform, he recalled.

“I screamed for help, ‘Please help, please help me,'” Steinberg said. “The Transit Authority people heard me — they just looked. They never stopped to help me, and that disturbs me more than anything else. I begged for someone to call an ambulance and get this guy off me.

“He just kept on stabbing me, and stabbing me and stabbing me, and the transit employees kept on working and working and working.”