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PICKING
their lives or had their lives significantly changed because of a
very senseless act of violence by
somebody who wanted to take a
phone and then resell that phone
on the black market,” Lanier, the
D.C. police chief, said last fall.
Alex Herald considers himself
lucky to be alive.
Last April 28, Herald, 20, and
his friend, Miguel Gonzalez, were
riding the subway in New York
City, headed home to the Bronx
after a night out. It was 4 a.m. and
they both fell asleep.
When Herald woke up, he recounted in an interview, he found
a hole in the front right pocket of
his pants — the place where he
always kept his smartphone. He
looked around the train and spotted a man holding a knife in one
hand and his phone in the other.
The man, whom police later
identified as 22-year-old Victor
Montalvo, got off at the train at
the Fordham Road station. Herald
says he confronted Montalvo on
the train platform and demanded
his phone. Montalvo held onto it,
so Herald punched him, prompting Montalvo to pull out a knife.
He stabbed Herald five times in
the face, once in the neck and
once in the back, according to a
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police report. Herald lay on the
train platform in a pool of blood
while his friend ran to get help.
“I thought to myself, ‘I’m going
to die,’ “ Herald recalled.
An ambulance arrived and
rushed him to the hospital, where
he received eight blood transfusions. In the ten months since, he
has been in three different hospitals, spending half that time on
life support.
On a recent morning, Herald lay
in bed at Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility on Roosevelt Island. Scars
from the stabbing marred his face
and neck. A red cap inserted in his
neck held in place a tracheostomy
tube. One stab wound had severed
a nerve in his spinal cord, paralyzing him from the neck down.
“It’s hard,” he said, speaking
softly in a Brooklyn accent as a
hospital machine beeped in the
background. “To be like this for
the rest of my life, over a damn
cell phone.”
Montalvo has been charged
with attempted murder. His attorney declined to comment.
Herald’s mother, Benedicta, said
her son was no stranger to crime
or violence. Herald dropped out of
high school, had been in several
fights and had been arrested for
marijuana possession and jumping
subway turnstiles, she said.