Kitchen worker left with stitches after NYC subway attacker hits him with beer bottle warns ‘it’s not safe anymore’

A kitchen worker was left with six stitches after a stranger bashed him in the face with a beer bottle in a Midtown subway attack Wednesday  — as the battered victim warned “it’s not safe anymore.”

Rafael Galves Garcia, 44, was standing on the northbound A and C train platform at Columbus Circle around 10:10 p.m. when a deranged man approached him and asked for a dollar, cops said.

“The guy came up to me and asked for money,” Garcia told The Post in Spanish Thursday afternoon. “I told him, ‘No, I don’t have any money.’ I thought he was leaving but he came back and asked me the same thing.”

That’s when the stranger grabbed a plastic bag Garcia was holding and tried to rip it away from him, he said.

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“What I had in the bag was a plastic water bottle and some chips,” Garcia said. “He grabbed it from my hand and I tried to get it from him, and in that moment he hit me with a glass bottle.”

The blow left Garcia with a cut on his forehead and minor bleeding, cops said.

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He was taken to Mount Sinai West, where he was listed in stable condition, but said he needed six stitches to close the gash.

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“I didn’t expect that to happen,” Garcia said. “People who beg for money don’t do that. It’s not something normal.”

The attacker ran off and had not been caught by Thursday.

Now, Garcia said he’ll keep a close eye out for his attacker – and will be prepared to call 911 to keep him from striking again.

“If I see him again I’ll call the police, because people like that can’t be doing those things in the subways,” Garcia said. “There are people with children. Imagine that he does that to someone who has kids with them.”

“Now I have to think about it, because at any moment something like this can happen. It’s not safe anymore.”

The crime is the latest in a series of troubling incidents in the city’s underground and comes days after an unhinged attacker with a long history of mental illness randomly shoved another man to his death in front of an East Harlem train, authorities said.

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