Before a parolee viciously shoved his girlfriend in front of a Manhattan subway train, a Bronx woman and her 4-year-old daughter were stabbed by the same man — who tore off a court-mandated ankle monitor just prior to his latest violence.
Christian Valdez, 35, has been charged with attempted murder and felony assault in a Sunday attack in which he pushed his 29-year-old girlfriend in front of a downtown No. 3 train at the Fulton St. station. The man admitted to the crime, which resulted in the victim having both legs amputated around the knee.
At the time, Valdez was on parole for an attempted-assault conviction from 2020. He’d been sentenced to eight years in prison but got paroled in January 2023, officials said.
Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News
A 29-year-old old woman was taken to Bellevue Hospital after her boyfriend reportedly pushed her onto the tracks during an argument. (Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News)
In December, the attacker was arrested again and charged with assault for repeatedly stabbing an ex-girlfriend in the Bronx, prosecutors said.
The victim was treated at a Bronx hospital, where she needed 50 stitches to close up numerous stab wounds, they added.
During a Jan. 18 hearing, the parolee’s attorney asked that he be released pending his next court appearance, which a judge granted.
Valdez was ordered to wear an ankle monitor during his release, but on March 8, he removed the device, prosecutors said.
The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said Monday that parole officers visited Valdez after he removed the GPS monitor, but could not clarify why a new device was not affixed to the man’s ankle.
Two days later, he attacked his girlfriend, leaving her with amputated limbs, multiple rib fractures and a blood clot in her lungs, prosecutors said.
It was only the latest in a series of horrifying attacks by Valdez.
“They let me down,” said Jenny Aquino, who, along with her daughter, survived an attack at his hands in 2017. “They told me he was locked up and then deported to Peru.”
Valdez was homeless when Aquino met him hanging out outside her apartment building, the woman recounted to the Daily News on Monday night. She invited him to church with her and once let him stay with her family overnight.
“He used to go to church and would be in his own world,” Aquino said. “My husband says, ‘You’re too nice to people’ — and he was right.”
Aquino still lives in the South Bronx apartment that Valdez busted into in September 2017.
“I came home from church with Bella and was getting her ready for bed,” recalled Aquino, 46. “I heard banging and then — boom. I grabbed Bella and ran for the fire escape. He said, ‘Look what I’m going to do to you, b—h.’”
Armed with a broken bottle, he followed the mother and daughter out onto the fire escape.
“I was fighting him,” Aquino said. “Bella cried and he grabbed her by the neck. He was choking her and wanted to throw her off the fire escape. He went to cut her throat, but she put up her arm and he slashed her.”
Aquino picked up her daughter and dropped her into the hands of a neighbor waiting below to catch the girl.
“I was going to do anything to save my daughter,” the brave mom explained.
A neighbor who ran into the apartment to help the woman hit Valdez over the head with a lamp, which knocked him out.
Over six years later, Aquino is still in therapy working through the trauma of the assault.
“I got PTSD, I have insomnia, I take five different medications,” she said. “I can’t work because I can’t be around people. My daughter Bella is terrified. She’s still terrified of that window.”
Aquino said she is “praying” for Valdez’s latest victim.
“He should go to jail for the rest of his life and never come out,” she said of the attacker.
Valdez has four past assault arrests on his record, according to police sources. His niece told The News on Sunday that he suffers from schizophrenia.
