Some homeless people camping out on subway trains went off the rails early Thursday as they were booted from the system during the second night of the unprecedented shutdown for coronavirus cleaning.
“If anybody comes in my face I’m f–king killing them!” one vagrant snarled at MTA workers as he, along with nearly 20 other homeless people, walked out of The Bronx’s Pelham Bay Park station off the No. 6 line around 1 a.m.
“Leave me the f–k alone!” the man shouted. “I’m tired of this s–t.”
Transit workers admitted it’s already a hassle giving hobos the boot.
“It’s a fight every day to get the trains clean — and that was true before COVID-19,” one worker said, explaining, “Now you’ve got homeless screaming at you, cursing at you, spitting at you, fighting with you. Like I said, it’s a fight.”
The employee added: “This needs to get done. But it needs to get done more ferociously.”
“Right now, they’re [the homeless] outside for a couple of hours. Then they’re back inside. It’s just a shuffle,” he said.
As the subway system closed for a scrub-down from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. — as it will every night for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic — some homeless wandered off into the dark, but others stuck around, seemingly lost.
“Jesus, somebody please help me,” one man pleaded as he stumbled out of the subway. “I’m so frigging lost.”
Luis Fernandez, 61, who has been homeless for the past 20 years, said he was confused by the cleaning plan.
“It don’t make no sense,” Fernandez said as he sat under a nearby bus awning with his bags and belongings. “I have to wait out here for a shuttle bus. But I don’t see any buses. I mean, how long is this going to take?”
Fernandez added: “This is my first night taking the shuttle. Last night they didn’t have a shuttle and I had to walk all the way to Buhre Avenue before I got on the subway again.”
Around 1:30 a.m., Fernandez, who said he avoids shelters, hopped onto a B12X bus to Manhattan.
He said he planned to get back on the rails once the subways reopened at 5 a.m.
During the first night of the subway shutdown, more than 1,000 NYPD officers secured stations and helped clear out trains, officials said.
City officials said homeless outreach teams and cops made contact with 252 New Yorkers in need that night, and 139 of them accepted help.
“We’ve never seen so much success in a single night before,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters during a press briefing Wednesday.