New York – Erika Menendez, the disturbed woman accused of shoving a man in front of a New York City subway train to his death last month said that she did it simply because she was having a bad day.
Menendez spoke to the New York Post on Friday from the city jail where she is awaiting trial in the murder case, saying that her “mind was just racing” the day she pushed 46-year-old Indian immigrant Sunando Sen to his death on the New York City subway tracks.
“I was mad. I was just angry,” the 31-year-old rambled. “I was homeless. I was hungry. I was fighting with my boyfriend. He came running up the stairs, and I just got up and pushed him.”
MSN notes that Menendez targeted Sen because of his ethnicity. She mistook him for a Muslim (Sen was Hindu) but said that she has been “beating up Muslims and Hindus for a long time.”
She also admitted that Sen tried to fight back. “He was trying to shake me off,” she said. He was unsuccessful.
“I’m not mad about the people. I’m mad because I liked the buildings,” Menendez said. “I just wanted to hurt Muslims and Hindus ever since [9/11].”
Menendez is also mentally disturbed, but admitted that she doesn’t take her medication. Instead, she self-medicates with marijuana. “If I smoked a blunt that day, I wouldn’t have pushed him,” Menendez said.
To Sen’s friends, Menendez’s reasons mean little. “How could she do this to him? My hands shake. I can’t be alone. I think of him all the time, all the time,” said the woman he rented from in Queens.
“We were family. Who cares if he is Muslim or Hindu? He was a man,” she said.
What do you think should happen to Erika Menendez, the accused NYC subway pusher?