A New Jersey father who was randomly stabbed six times in the neck while waiting at a bus stop has been photographed for the first time.
Carpenter Daniel Salvatore, 66, was reading a book at the Port Authority bus terminal in Midtown Manhattan when a stranger with a knife silently ambushed him during his Monday morning commute to work.
Cops identified the man as Michael McCloskey, 42, and Salvatore said he didn’t say a word in the moments before he allegedly launched the “deranged” attack.
“He should have been dead,” Salvatore said. The New York Post from his hospital bed. “I received 46 points and I’m very grateful to still be here.”
While celebrating his 66th birthday recovering from the trauma in the hospital on Tuesday, Salvatore added that “something has to be done” about the “mentally ill” on the streets of the Big Apple. “He’s very unsafe here,” he said.
Carpenter Daniel Salvatore (circled) was reading a book at the Port Authority bus terminal in Midtown Manhattan when a stranger with a knife silently ambushed him during his Monday morning commute to work.
The terrifying random attack occurred at the Port Authority bus terminal in Midtown Manhattan.
The carpenter, who has three children in their 20s, had been waiting for a bus to take him to work when McCloskey allegedly stabbed him eight times in the neck and arm just before 6am.
Salvatore said he has been making the same trip from New Jersey to Manhattan for five years and stops at the Midtown bus terminal to wait for his co-worker. He routinely reads a book while waiting at the stop.
On Monday he was leafing through I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger, a novel he had been bought as a birthday gift, when the attacker lunged at him.
“I was sitting there reading and someone came up on my blind side, on my right side, I saw him, I turned around, I saw his face and all of a sudden the knife stuck in my neck,” Salvatore told the Post.
“He didn’t say anything,” Salvatore added. “The detectives asked me if I had run into him or said anything to him and I said, ‘No, nothing, I didn’t see this guy at all, I was just minding my business reading a book.’
Salvatore fell to the ground during the attack and attempted to crawl away while McCloskey allegedly continued stabbing him.
“I finally broke away from him, broke control, and there was blood everywhere,” Salvatore told the Post.
He said that as blood “poured” from his neck, he ran to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts where stunned customers tried to block his wounds with napkins.
“I started going out and I got dizzy because of all the blood I lost,” Salvatore told the Post.
Pictured: Police officers patrol in the hallway connecting the New York City Port Authority bus terminal and the Times Square subway station.
New Yorkers say their city is becoming a more dangerous and worse place to live, a Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) survey reveals.
Paramedics rushed to his aid and took him away in an ambulance, while police managed to handcuff his attacker at the scene.
Salvatore, who is a Christian, said he believes God intervened in the stabbing to save him.
“I have two lines here, cut marks, but they never penetrated,” he told the Post, pointing to the cuts on his neck.
‘I’m thinking that the Lord pushed [McCloskey’s] Take your hand away from me.
‘A detective told me that if a cut was a little lower and deeper, I would bleed to death. I am very lucky.”
Salvatore even empathized with his attacker and said New York needs to do more for mentally ill people who end up on the streets.
“The guy was probably very mentally disturbed, I feel for him, but he needs to be kept locked up so he doesn’t do this to anyone else if he’s that disturbed,” he told the Post.
‘There is a problem with the mentally ill: you see them at the Port Authority, at Penn Station, on the streets, getting attached to themselves.
‘Something needs to be done. “It’s very unsafe here in New York City.”
Mayor Eric Adams has struggled to fulfill campaign promises to address crime, safety and rat infestations in New York City. Residents feel it is becoming a more dangerous place to live.
And Salvatore’s assessment of the city reflects the general opinion of New Yorkers: As a recent poll shows, most people feel that it has become more dangerous in recent years.
The share of residents who rate life in the city as good or excellent fell from 50 percent to 30 percent between 2017 and 2023, while a third of New Yorkers say the quality of life is now poor, a survey by the Citizen Budget Commission (CBC) in March.
Residents feel much less safe in their neighborhoods than in 2017, especially on the public transportation system.
The survey comes as Adams has struggled to deliver on campaign promises to address crime, safety and rat infestations, amid a surge in immigrants that is draining the city’s coffers of billions of dollars.
Andrew Rein, president of the research group, said the survey revealed a “stark reality that [residents] They clearly rate the quality of life and the quality of services in the city as not good.’