The Queens man accused of stabbing four people should be locked up “for good,” the wife of one of the victims told The Post.
Patrick Benjamin was walking his wife Shirley to work in southeast Queens at around 7:20 a.m. when the surreptitious stabber snuck up behind the couple with a hunting knife, she said.
“We have been going that way for nearly five years and nothing ever happened,” Shirley, 73, said Saturday.
“So early in the morning this man going out and doing this to people,” she said. “They have to put him away for good.”
Jermain Rigueur, 27, was arrested Thursday for allegedly knifing four people in Springfield Gardens and Jamaica on Jan. 16 and 17, authorities said.
The Benjamins were walking Wednesday in front of 134-17 161st Street, toward Guy R. Brewer Boulevard, when the knifeman “reached around” and sliced the 74-year-old Patrick in the stomach, cops said.
Benjamin needed surgery because the six-inch knife “touched his colon,” his wife said.
“He was walking with me to work,” the home attendant said from her husband’s bedside. “We had our hoodies on because it was cold. [The attacker] came up behind us.”
They had no warning.
“We didn’t hear nothing, that’s why we were so surprised,” she said. “Oh my God! We weren’t even looking back.”
Suddenly, her husband buckled.
“I saw my husband holding his side and he went down,” she said. “He didn’t know what it was. He felt a pinch. I pulled up his jacket and I saw the blood. I was crying and everything, oh my God!”
The attacker disappeared as fast as he had appeared, she said.
“When I turned around he was gone,” she said. “I didn’t see his face. I didn’t see nothing.”
Another victim of the stabber said he had a face-to-face conversation with him on an MTA bus.
Medical assistant Ryan Moore, 36, was on his way to work when he asked Rigueur, a stranger, if he could sit down on the Q111 on 115th Street.
“He was sitting by by the window in the back with his book bag on the seat,” Ryan said. “I asked him if he could move his book bag so I could sit down. He got up, held his book bag and said I should sit by the window.”
A few stops later, seats opened up and the knifeman asked Moore to move so he could have the window seat back, he said.
Moore thought that was the end of it, but when he got off the bus he felt something jabbing into his back.
“Suddenly before my feet could touch the steps he came up behind me and was trying to stab me more than one time,” Moore said. “That’s when I fell. He tried to stab me at my side and around the chest area on the right side. The knife didn’t penetrate my jacket but it cut my jacket in the front.”
Moore ran to escape but fell in front of a bus.
“Eventually he stopped trying to stab me and he ran away,” Moore said. “I got up to check myself to see if I was bleeding.”
Moore told police what happened and drove around with the cops looking for him to no avail.
He didn’t realize he had been stabbed until he went home and took his clothes off.
“My shirt had a hole in it and my jacket had a hole in it,” he said. “I have a cut in my back.”
The incident has left him rattled about taking public transportation.
“I was not expecting that situation,” he said. “I didn’t know there was someone going around stabbing people.”
“I was shocked,” Moore added. “I feel good that he is off the streets and he cannot do it to anyone else.”
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