Four people were arrested after cellphone video captured on a subway surfaced that shows a woman getting slapped after taunting a man about his coat, prompting an all-out brawl on the uptown F train over the weekend.
Another person, the one shooting the cellphone video or someone behind him, appears to tease one of the women taunting the man in the coat about her shoes, saying Steve Maddens are out of style. The woman gets in the face of the person videotaping the fracas, then her friend smacks him.
The woman then goes back to the man mocked earlier for his coat, calls him stupid and makes fun of his speech. He trades verbal insults and the woman hits him in the face with a high-heeled shoe; then the man in the coat slaps her -- hard. A full-blown brawl then erupts between the group of women, a man they were with and the coat-wearing man as the other riders in the car flee to opposite ends for safety.
"She got smacked, and that echoed through the entire subway," David Ratliff, the man who shot the cellphone video, told NBC 4 New York. "I heard it. Everybody on the train heard it. Everybody in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx heard it."
The video of the altercation around 5 a.m. Saturday on an F train bound for Washington Square was posted on YouTube. As of Monday afternoon, it had been viewed about 1 million times.
The four suspects, who range in age from 20 to 25 and include the man in the coat, were arrested at the West Fourth Street station after the fight. A woman who allegedly hit the man in the coat with the shoe was charged with felony assault.
The others were charged with misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct.
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Ratliff, who lives in Chicago, was visiting New York City for the first time to celebrate his friend Sammy Lorenzo's birthday.
"This is crazy, insanity," Ratliff said. "It's mind-blowing. We were just out here for the weekend."
