A career criminal accused of brutally beating a New York City subway cleaner last year has been found mentally unfit to stand trial.
Alexander Wright, 49, was charged with viciously assaulting MTA employee Anthony Nelson, 35, after he stopped the suspect from harassing straphangers in the Pelham Bay Park train station on Aug. 11.
The beating left Nelson hospitalized with a broken collarbone and dislocated nose.
On Thursday, Bronx Supreme Court Justice Connie Morales ruled that Wright will not stand trial on assault charges due to his mental state.
“Two court-appointed doctors examined the defendant and found him unfit to proceed to trial,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said in a statement. “Justice Morales remanded the defendant to a psychiatric facility until he is deemed fit to stand trial.”
Alexander Wright has been arrested a staggering 41 times. nypdWright’s assault of the subway worker was the latest notch in his lengthy rap sheet.
He has been arrested a whopping 41 times in the past, including for an anti-Asian hate crime that cemented him as the revolving-door-justice poster boy.
In June 2021, Wright was busted for allegedly slugging a 55-year-old Asian woman in Lower Manhattan in a caught-on-video attack.
A month earlier, he was accused of tossing scalding coffee on two traffic agents in Manhattan.
After pummeling the Asian woman, Wright was held at Bellevue Hospital for a psych evaluation, however it was not clear when or why he was freed after that incident or the coffee attack.
Wright was deemed unfit to stand trial on Thursday.
Wright was busted in 2021 after he was caught on camera punching an Asian woman in lower Manhattan.
Wright, who lived in a homeless shelter on Wards Island and goes by the nickname “Disney,” had been arrested for a slew of other alleged crimes, including other assaults, disorderly conduct, petty theft and criminal possession of a controlled substance, police and cop sources said.
He had previously been reported to authorities three times as an “emotionally disturbed person,” police sources said.
As his alleged career-criminal past came to light last year, then-NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea seethed on NY1, “What are we doing in society when we are releasing these people right back onto the streets?
“It’s putting New Yorkers at risk,” Shea said.
Nelson’s enraged mother, Lisa Nelson, called Wright “a menace to society after he sent her son to the hospital
Subway worker Anthony Nelson was hospitalized with a broken collarbone after Wright attacked him in the Bronx in August. MTA/Tim Minton“This man Alexander Wright should not be walking the streets,” she said at a union rally held outside The Bronx courthouse on behalf of her son. “I hope these politicians and these judges give him the max that he deserves and do not let him walk free.”
She noted that her son was once hailed by the Knicks as a “pandemic hero” for his continued work during COVID.
Robert Kelley, vice president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, told The Post that Nelson was “nothing less than a hero.”
The MTA described Nelson in a statement as a “model employee’’ while also urging “the Bronx District Attorney to prosecute this unprovoked crime to the fullest extent.
“Someone with dozens of priors should not be free to harass subway riders and brutally attack the employees who make this city move,” the transit agency said in August.
