He came back four times.
Bairon Hernandez, 34, a Honduran national with at least 15 arrests on his record — aggravated assault, weapons possession, domestic violence, drug charges, obstruction — was deported from the United States four separate times. The last time was in 2020. He came back anyway.
On Sunday, federal officials say, he walked into the Lexington Avenue station at 63rd Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and shoved two strangers onto the tracks.
One was Jhon Pena, 30. The other was Richard Williams, 83 — a veteran who served his country in the United States Air Force and who is now clinging to life in a hospital bed.
Hernandez was charged Tuesday with attempted murder, attempted assault, and reckless endangerment.
His daughter, Debbie Williams, did not mince words. “Now I’m pissed, now I’m upset,” she told the New York Post. “How the f–k did he get back here?”
It is a fair question. It is, in fact, the only question that matters right now — and it deserves a serious answer from serious people in positions of authority.
DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis called Hernandez a “serial criminal” who should “never have been able to walk our streets and harm innocent Americans.”
She is right. The question is not whether the system failed. It plainly did. The question is how, and why, and what is going to be done so that it doesn’t happen again — to the next Richard Williams, waiting on the next platform, in the next American city.
Debbie Williams wants the man who allegedly destroyed her father sent to the harshest prison on earth. That is the voice of grief, and it deserves to be heard. But the rest of us should want something else alongside justice for Hernandez: accountability for a system that let him back in four times, and the will to build something that works.
The veteran on that platform had already given this country his service. He deserved better from it.
