Thanks to loyal readers who emailed me links from local Philadelphia media outlets regarding the violent incident aboard a Philadelphia train earlier this month.

The victim, 20-year-old lab technician Dewayne Taylor, was asleep on the train when he was attacked without provocation by a mentally disturbed 26-year-old man with a history of violence.

After the man brutally beat Taylor with a ball pean hammer, he picked up Taylor’s dropped cell phone and sold it on the street for $150. The transaction was caught on tape as was the senseless beating.

Hopefully, the check Taylor gets from the transit authority and the city after he wins his lawsuit will be enough for him to buy a car so he won’t have to ride the trains.

Here’s updated info on the strange case:

It didn’t take long for Dewayne Taylor to be lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the train and the hip-hop tunes playing on his iPod.

After a long day of work at the University of Pennsylvania last Thursday, the 20-year-old lab technician didn’t mind getting a little shut-eye while he rode SEPTA’s Broad Street subway line home to East Germantown.

Then he felt bolts of pain explode in his skull.

When his eyes opened, Taylor said that he found a deranged man he didn’t know standing over him, smashing him on the head with a ball-peen hammer.

“I thought it was possible, very possible, that he was trying to kill me,” Taylor said last night.

The savage attack lasted for five minutes and ended on the Fairmount Avenue platform, when Taylor said that he fought back as the hammer-wielding psycho tried to push him down onto the rail tracks.

“I don’t know how to God I got the strength, but I started to defend myself,” Taylor said. READ MORE…

The sad part isn’t the fact that 20 other riders stood by and did nothing to help Taylor, it’s the fact that the hammer wielding psycho’s young son seemed desensitized to the violence.