The creepy man accused of pushing his ex-girlfriend onto Manhattan subway tracks last weekend should never have been released, a former victim blasted in The Post on Monday.
Jenny Aquino said she still can’t forget the day in 2017 when Christian Valdez “devilishly” barged into her apartment and brutally stabbed her and her 4-year-old daughter. It’s hard to understand why Valdez, now on parole, let Lower go free in an attack at a Manhattan subway station on Saturday that left the victim seriously injured.
“I still have PTSD and my daughter still has nightmares,” Aquino, 43, told Valdez’s post, according to prosecutors. “I think he should be in prison forever. He needs to be put somewhere and not come out.
“I think he should be in prison for a long time because he is a danger to society and a danger to society,” she said. “We shouldn’t have let him go out in the first place.”
Aquino said he met Valdez, 35, around his South Bronx apartment and suggested they go to church together, but he never thought Valdez was mentally unstable.
On September 13, 2017, he and his daughter Vera Perez were returning to their third-floor apartment after church when a nightmare occurred.
“I just heard a knock on the door,” she recalled. “When I heard that thud, something told me to get out of the fire escape. Me and my daughter had to run out of the fire escape. He came to the fire escape.
“He stabbed me and I was trying to take it away from him and I thought he would stop if he saw Bella,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Chris, look at Bella.’ But when he saw her, he looked like a real devil. He strangled her, he killed her. I almost threw her out the window.”
That’s when her neighbor, a guardian angel, intervened and saved her life, she said.
“He’s not mentally stable,” Aquino said of Valdez.
Valdez was arrested in 2020 for attempted second-degree assault, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to up to eight years in prison, but was released on parole from Sing Sing Correctional Facility in January 2023.
Police said Saturday that Valdez got into an argument with his 29-year-old ex-girlfriend at the Fulton Street Station near Chambers Street in Manhattan and is suspected of pushing the victim into the path of an oncoming train.
The victim, who also uses pronouns, was bruised and lost the lower part of both of his legs. The former man was rushed to Bellevue Hospital, where he remained Monday, hospital officials said.
Valdez fled the scene of the attack but was arrested by the NYPD in Brooklyn late Saturday.
The suspect was arraigned late Sunday in Manhattan Criminal Court and charged with attempted second-degree murder and first-degree assault in the brutal attack. Valdez was ordered held without bail.
Meanwhile, Aquino said she and Bella, now 11, remain on guard, fearing that the attackers will somehow walk the streets and return to their home.
She filed a lawsuit against Valdez and the building’s owner, GMZ Properties, in September 2018, alleging the landlord failed to provide safeguards to ensure her safety, according to court records. .
The lawsuit was settled out of court and an agreement was signed on January 12, 2023. That was three days after Mr. Valdez was released from prison after being found guilty of attempted assault.
“They can’t fire the guy if he’s going to keep doing things like that,” she said.
Additional reporting by Desheania Andrews
