85-year-old woman punched by rider on MBTA Silver Line bus
BOSTON - She's 85 years old and Maureen Halpin has the black eye to show just what happened when she tried to help a woman backing out of a Silver Line bus with a wheelchair as she was trying to get on.
"We were all waiting; I went to help her and she got angry. I said 'are you ungrateful I'm trying to help you.' With that she turned around and punched me," Halpin tells WBZ-TV.
Those were apparently fighting words for her alleged attacker 63-year-old Aisha Dawud who has been arraigned on assault and battery charges and released on personal recognizance.
It was a hard enough sucker punch that left Halpin bleeding and sent her to the hospital. "If you touch it, it's sore where the brow bone is," she said. "It was hard."
It happened on the Silver Line at Washington and East Berkeley in Boston's South End. It's a bus that Halpin has boarded frequently to visit her daughter and the assault has left her stunned. "I didn't move fast enough to get out of her way, that's what they said. It's just the fact there's no reason I got hit trying to help somebody," Halpin said.
Transit Police put out a tweet about the attack, they say, as a way to inform riders. But riders themselves often post about incidents on the MBTA which Superintendent Richard Sullivan says makes it seem random violence is on the rise. "I think that lends itself to a perception there's an explosion of random assaults on the MBTA when the numbers don't support that," said Sullivan.
Still, he says an attack on an elderly woman like Maureen Halpin is unacceptable. Sore eye and all, she's determined it won't stop her, the bus is how she gets around. "I didn't ask for it, but it does happen," she said. "I just happened to be in the way that's all."