He didn’t go down without a fight.
The Muslim-hating maniac who shoved a Queens immigrant to his death in front of the 7 train told The Post yesterday that the victim tried to shake her off at the last second — but she was determined to kill.
“My mind was just racing that day. I was mad. I was just angry,” Erika Menendez, 31, said in a rambling interview on Rikers Island.
“I was homeless. I was hungry. I was fighting with my boyfriend. He came running up the stairs, and I just got up and pushed him.”
Sunando Sen, 46, didn’t have time to react.
“He was trying to shake me off,” she said.
Paul Martinka
Erika Menendez
Menendez — glassy-eyed, greasy-haired and clad in a prison jumpsuit — professed her hatred for Muslims and Hindus and said the murder was revenge for 9/11. Sen was Hindu.
But the massive loss of life in the World Trade Center attacks was not what left her enraged.
“I’m not mad about the people. I’m mad because I liked the buildings,” Menendez said.
“I just wanted to hurt Muslims and Hindus ever since [9/11].”
Her attachment to the buildings, she said, comes from being a native New Yorker.
For much of the interview, she was emotionless.
But her eyes lit up and she became very animated when describing other violent run-ins with people she believed were Muslim or Hindu.
“I’ve been beating up Muslims and Hindus for a long time. I just want to hurt them. I would punch them,” she said.
Her racist rants and callous disregard for Sen’s life horrified the dead man’s heartbroken friends.
“How could she do this to him? My hands shake. I can’t be alone. I think of him all the time, all the time,” said the woman he rented a room from in Queens.
Her son is now scared to ride the subway, she said.
“We were family. Who cares if he is Muslim or Hindu? He was a man,” she said.
That’s not what the unhinged Menendez saw on Dec. 29.
In her first interview since being arrested, she told The Post that Sen had stood out from the other riders because of his religion.
The tragedy might have been averted if she had taken the medicine she is prescribed.
She said she doesn’t take them because she hates the side effects, which make her “shaky.”
She “self-medicates” by smoking pot.
“If I smoked a blunt that day, I wouldn’t have pushed him,” Menendez said.
Sen was the second person fatally shoved in front of a subway train last month.
Queens father Ki Suk Han, 58, was pushed into the path of a Q train at the 49th Street station in Manhattan on Dec. 3 by Naeem Davis, cops said.
Additional reporting by Natasha Velez
jennifer.fermino@nypost.com
Subway pusher Erika Menendez describes killing Sunando Sen
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Subway pusher Erika Menendez describes killing Sunando Sen
