A West Village woman used an ingenious tactic to escape from an unhinged vagrant who pulled a knife on her earlier this month — claiming she had COVID while coughing in his direction, she told The Post.
Jane Duncan was taking her usual walk a few blocks from Washington Square Park on Feb. 4 when a known local vagrant suddenly jumped in front of her and pulled a knife out of his pocket, she said.
“As he was pulling the knife, I started coughing all over the place,” the 52-year-old said.
“I was like ‘I have COVID. I’m on my way to the ER.’ As I was doing that, he had the knife out and he got scared of me and ran away.”
The man, known in the neighborhood as “Matthew,” asked, “Why are you harassing me?” when he whipped out his weapon.
The two had no prior confrontation, she said, “which makes me think it’s not just that he’s violent, it’s that he’s mentally ill — like he must be hearing voices.”
Duncan, who lives in her childhood home near Washington Street and Bank Street, said more vagrants live in her neighborhood than ever before and she has been using the COVID defense to ward them off too.
“When people are aggressive and getting in my face I start coughing and saying COVID and ‘I’m on my way to the ER,’” admitted Duncan, who provides pet-sitting and cares for the elderly.
“This used to be a real froufrou area,” she said of the nabe, where median rents have soared to around $5,000 a month, according to Zumper.com.
“But I’ve noticed that people are getting more and more aggressive about panhandling to the point where they’re practically mugging you.”
Duncan said she filed a report with cops in the NYPD’s 6th Precinct.
She posted about the incident on NextDoor.com.
“They kept asking me ‘Are you sure it was a knife?'” she recalled.
“I’m not an idiot I know what a knife looks like.”
When Duncan saw the man sleeping on a bench a few days later, she called the cops again — in part out of fear for her teenage son, she said.
Six police officers responded — but refused to search him for a weapon, she claimed.
“They were like ‘Wake up, buddy. Wake up, Matthew,’” she said.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, you’re not even going to do anything.'”
Duncan did not tell officers the man had a knife, according to the NYPD.
The man hasn’t been charged.
When approached by The Post, he explained that he was homeless.
“I sleep in the street,” he said. “People think I’m crazy. Yeah, they do.”
He then cursed and became irrational.
Duncan said she’d like to see him get mental health care.
“What I want is reform,” she said.
“I don’t think arresting him and releasing him is the right thing. I think we need to have a system with mental health care.”
Despite the success of her COVID-crime-fighting technique, Duncan said she’s thinking about getting pepper spray to protect herself.
“I would only use that if I felt like verbally I couldn’t get away from them,” she said.
“But it would make me feel a little bit safer.”
