Photo by Drew McDermott

In yesterday’s Post opinion section, a Metro rider recounted a bizarre and violent incident he suffered a few weeks ago when he was assaulted by another passenger aboard a Blue Line train, but then nearly left in the lurch when Transit Police were slow to respond.

Kurtis Hiatt had to go into his office in the external relations department of George Washington University on Saturday, March 31, to help cover a Clinton Global Initiative event at the school that weekend. He boarded at the Stadium-Armory station about 7 a.m. Like most early-morning trains on a random weekend, it was not very crowded. As he usually does on Metrorail, Hiatt, 23, sat down and listend to some music on his iPhone.

But on the other end of the car, he recounted, another passenger was screaming “Fuck the white man! Fuck the white man!” and attracting Hiatt’s and everyone else’s attention. As he wrote in the Post:

The man’s yells reverberated through the Metrorail car, breaking the quiet typical of an early-morning ride. I turned down the music on my iPhone. What was that? “[Fuck] the white man!” he screamed again. My fellow Blue Line riders and I looked around uneasily. I couldn’t see the man, but I did note that I seemed to be one of very few white men in the car. Still, I brushed it off. It’s not unusual to encounter crazy behavior while riding Metro. Rarely do things turn serious. As the train arrived at L’Enfant Plaza, I briefly considered switching cars. I didn’t.

As the train left L’Enfant Plaza, the disturbing passenger stood directly in front of Hiatt and demanded his attention. “He got down at face level within an inch of my face and screamed, ‘Look at me’,” Hiatt told DCist in a phone interview. From there, with the train barreling toward Smithsonian, things turned violent.

Seemingly unprovoked, the man head-butted and punched Hiatt before Hiatt could push him away and the man could be restrained by other passengers. But one woman’s efforts to alert the conductor via the car’s emergency button went unheeded. At Smithsonian, the doors opened and Hiatt’s attacker bolted out. Hiatt and two other passengers gave chase, stopping briefly to alert the conductor, but again to no apparent success.

Upstairs from the platform, Hiatt watched his attacker jump the turnstile as he tried to approach the on-duty station manager. Hiatt couldn’t tell if the station manager was alerting police, so he called 911 himself. But when the dispatcher heard he was calling from a Metrorail station he was transferred from Metropolitan Police Department to Transit Police.

Hiatt and the two other riders followed their assailant outside, where the man eventually settled on a bench at 14th Street and Independence Avenue SW after tossing his shoes into the street and hurling more exclamations into the morning air. An ambulance arrived first, but Hiatt said he did not need medical treatment. The paramedics alerted MPD, which arrived a few minutes later, just as a Transit Police car finally pulled up about 15 minutes after the assault. The responding Transit Police officer had arrived from Alexandria, giving Hiatt something of a jurisdictional head-scratcher.

“Presumably the dispatcher was aware of this,” Hiatt wrote in his op-ed. “How could she not seek an alternative to a full 15-minute wait, especially after I pleaded with her to do so? It made me feel as if my emergency was laughably minor.”

Transit Police arrested the man at 7:21 a.m. for assault and battery.

Hiatt said he received a phone call Sunday night from a deputy to Transit Police Chief Michael Taborn, who said he’d look into both the assault and why it took so long for Transit Police officers to respond. Taborn did not respond for this article, but Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said the station manager at Smithsonian was in fact the first person to alert Transit Police of the March 31 assault.

In the mean time, Hiatt said he remains a loyal Blue Line commuter, as driving from his Hill East neighborhood to his office in Foggy Bottom is both cost-prohibitive and impractical. But he’s become a bit more vigilant on the train, and is working with the popular blog Unsuck D.C. Metro to solicit other riders’ stories of being the victims of random assaults on Metrorail.

He might not have to look that far. Quite memorably in January 2011, a man standing on the platform at L’Enfant Plaza was assaulted by a group of teenagers who filmed the assault and posted it to YouTube.

Hiatt said what happened to him “makes you stop and think.”

“I wasn’t on the train at three in the morning drunk from a night out,” he said. “I was commuting to work.” Hiatt said, not irrationally, that he expected Metrorail would have some kind of standard operating procedure to react to an instance of one passenger attacking another. But what he experienced was far from that.

“It was a major fail on their part,” he said.