Good riddance.
A Brooklyn man who tried to rob a station agent - and then attempted to set her booth on fire - is going to state prison. Everett Robinson, 52, pled guilty Wednesday to attempted robbery in Brooklyn Supreme Court. A judge is now scheduled sentence Robinson to seven years behind bars next month. Robinson doused the booth aperture with gasoline and lit a rag with hopes of sparking an inferno. Fortunately, the station’s fire-suppression system snuffed out the flames - but it was a deadly dangerous, and incredibly callous, criminal act.
“This defendant tried to rob an MTA employee who was simply doing her job and put her and the public in serious danger when he started a fire inside a subway station, making the prison term he will receive appropriate and just,” Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement to Local 100.
Robinson’s victim, Station Agent Percillia Augustine-Soverall, 45, said she was satisfied with the punishment, which is part of a plea agreement Brooklyn prosecutors hashed out with Robinson’s defense attorney. She has returned to work and is focusing on the future. “Every day is a struggle but I have to move forward,” she said. “I can’t let this deter me. I just hope no other station agent has to go through what I went through.” Augustine-Soverall was in the booth at the Nostrand Ave. station on the No. 3 line in Crown Heights one Friday night last August when Robinson poured a liquid that smelled like gasoline into the aperture, she said. “He said that if I didn’t give him the money, he would light me up,” Augustine-Soverall, who has been on the job about five years, said.
Robinson then held up a shirt or rag, lit in on fire and tried to stuff it through the opening. Smoke from the burning cloth filled the mezzanine and booth, triggering the Halon fire-suppression system. “Everything was just cloudy in the booth,” Augustine-Soverall said. “I couldn’t do anything…I just started crying. I was in shock.”
Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Bruce Balter is scheduled to formally sentence Robinson on Aug. 16. In his statement, Gonzalez, who is running to fill the DA seat vacated by the sudden death of Ken Thompson earlier this year, also said in his statement to Local 100 that he is “committed to protecting our dedicated transit workers, who all too often are targets of threats and violence, and will continue to ensure that those who attack them are punished.” Such a pledge from a prosecutor is always welcome, and Local 100 has endorsed Gonzalez in the race.
But Local 100 didn’t take anything for granted in the Robinson case. Dozens of TWU Local 100 members and officers attended Robinson’s arraignment before another judge, William Harrington, packing the courtroom and casting withering stares at the criminal. Local 100 members then marched down the hallway with their fists in the air as photographers from the New York Daily News and New York Post snapped away. Stations Vice President Derick Echevarria and Chairman Joe Bermudez told the reporters Local 100 was pleased with the charges brought by prosecutors. But they blasted Justice Harrington for denying a media request to take Robinson’s photograph in the courtroom. “Why is he coddling someone who tried to kill one of our members, a Station Agent who was simply doing her job serving the riders?,” Bermudez said. It was a good show of solidarity. It demonstrated to prosecutors and judges in the building that the Local 100 and its 42,000-strong membership was watching.
