A Staten Island stabbing sparked by a can of fart spray became fodder for politicians looking to decry the parenting of the teens involved and rail against criminal justice reform — but a grand jury refused to indict one of the youngsters after learning the adult victim may have escalated the messy melee.
The victim, a 51-year-old man, was hurt in the April 21 incident at the Great Kills stop on the Staten Island Railroad. At a news conference three days later, Vito Fossella, Staten Island’s Republican borough president, decried the violence and what he referred to as “this turnstile type of justice.”
Another press conference attendee, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-S.I.), blasted the state’s bail reform laws and the “Raise the Age” law, which increased New York’s age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 years old.
On Monday, a Staten Island grand jury saw it differently — and declined to bring adult charges against a 14-year-old boy initially accused of attempted murder after the youngster argued self-defense and the 51-year-old admitted taunting the teens.
A 13-year-old girl accused of attempted murder in the actual stabbing remained in custody after a juvenile court hearing Friday, said a spokesman for the city Law Department, which prosecutes children in Family Court.
A 24-second video posted on SILive.com shows the end of the fight, with the 51-year-old on the ground, besieged by the teens, but not what happened beforehand.
It started when the accused 14-year-old and his friends, including two young boys and the 13-year-old girl, boarded the Staten Island Railway at Stapleton for a Friday afternoon train and bus journey to the Staten Island Mall.
“They’re kids, so I guess one of them had, like, some fart spray or whatever,” the 14-year-old boy’s father told the Daily News. “And they sprayed it on the train. And then from that, I guess, the gentleman was offended or had an issue with it.”
Because grand jury proceedings are secret,…
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