Angry mother tells News about the pursuit of a man who slashed his 11-year-old daughter with a box cutter in an attack in Harlem

The mother of an 11-year-old girl who was attacked on an East Harlem street by a stranger with a box cutter was determined to catch the man even as he tried to escape on a subway, the angry mother told the Daily News .

Malgorzata Sladek was walking through East Harlem with her daughter Maxi on Friday afternoon when Shaquan Cummings allegedly stormed up to the child and hit her with a box cutter, cutting her long black hair and slashing the back of the teen’s head.

For Sladek, the sound of the blade hitting bone was deafening.

“It sounded like he hit her in the head,” Sladek, 46, told the Daily News on Saturday. “I didn’t know it was a knife until I turned around and saw her hair on the floor and the blood flowing. Blood like it came from a sink. I thought she was going to bleed to death.”

That’s when Cummings, who Sladek and her daughter had never seen before, turned toward the panicked mother, according to police.

“He looked at me and came toward me,” she recalled. “I wasn’t sure if he was going to stab me or what was going to happen.”

A moment later, the stranger ran toward a No. 6 subway station near E. 116th St. and Lexington Ave. But Sladek wouldn’t let him harm their baby.

“I just went and chased him,” she remembers. “I didn’t care. I had bags with me. I said, ‘I’m going after him.'” I won’t let him get away.'”

According to police, Cummings ran into the train station and threw the bloody box cutter onto the tracks. Sladek saw him trying to board a waiting train and began shouting after him.

“I started screaming, ‘Stop the train!’ Stop the train!’ And the conductor stopped the train,” she recalls.

When the train stopped, Cummings jumped onto the tracks, walked to the other platform and returned to the street, where he was met by an angry crowd of witnesses.

According to a video shared with the Daily News, more than a dozen people gathered around Cummings as he returned to the street. The would-be slasher crouched in a doorway as four police officers surrounded him, keeping the angry mob from laying hands on him.

The video shows one of the angry witnesses beating Cummings with a gray walking stick while police held back the mob.

“I got off the train and saw him being attacked by the police and other people,” Sladek remembers.

Officers removed the box cutter from the tracks and charged Cummings with assault, endangering the welfare of a child and weapons possession. His arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court was scheduled for Saturday.

Cummings lives in public housing in the Bronx, about three miles from the scene of the attack. Cummings was arguing with another adult before he suddenly turned around and attacked Maxi. However, it is unclear why he attacked the child, a police source familiar with the case said.

Mario Barber, an MTA employee at the station, saw Cummings running across the tracks.

“The third rail caused a spark,” Barber recalls. “He just said that people were trying to chase him and beat him up. But he seemed kind of delusional and belligerent.”

Maxi, whose hair was caked in blood, was taken to Harlem Hospital, where she needed both stitches and staples to close the gnarly wound.

“She had head surgery,” said the outraged mother. “He cut the back of her head from top to bottom. It was like her whole head had been cut off.”

Maxi was off school on Friday and was shopping with her mother when the attack took place.

“We decided, ‘Oh, we’ll go shopping and spend time together,’ and it was a normal day for us,” Sladek said.

Then the unimaginable happened.

“It took a second and our lives changed,” Sladek said. “Someone comes from behind while you’re walking on the sidewalk, without thinking about it, and cuts her head in half.”

The bloody attack completely traumatized Maxi, who used to enjoy going outside and shopping, said the heartbroken mother.

“She said she didn’t want to go back to school. She said she didn’t want to go outside, she wanted to go outside,” said Sladek, who lives in Brooklyn. “She says, ‘Mom, I’m not going anywhere. Please don’t let me out of the house. I don’t want to go outside.’