A New York City EMT stabbed eight times by an unhinged patient in the back of her ambulance nearly a year ago still hasn’t returned to work – and is plagued by nightmares.
“I thought I was going to die,” Julia Fatum told The Post of the July 19 attack which left her hospitalized for a week and walking with a cane for months afterward.
It was a typical night shift for Fatum, 26, until she responded to a 9 p.m. call about a man having heart trouble on the Upper West Side.
She and her partner picked up Rudolph “Rudy” Garcia, a 48-year-old Bronx man, and headed to Mount Sinai Hospital.
“We were a couple of blocks from the hospital,” she recalled in her first interview since the horrific attack. “He became agitated.”
The bald brute yelled “F–k you!” and pulled a kitchen knife from his sock, prosecutors said at his arraignment.
Fatum, who was in the back of the ambulance, shouted to her partner who was driving.
The driver skidded to a halt and Fatum attempted to escape through the back doors.
“The lock was jammed,” she said.
The 6-foot-1 Garcia – an ex-con whose rap sheet included two felony convictions for assaulting a cop — plunged the blade into Fatum’s left arm.
“You stop feeling things physically and you just go into your mind,” Fatum, sitting on a park bench during the interview, said quietly.
“It’s just, like, ‘Wow’ . . . I never thought it would happen to me, and now I think I’m going to die.
“Everything went black in my mind. I just couldn’t believe what was happening. It felt like a bad dream,” she said.
Garcia stabbed Fatum seven more times – five times in her left leg, once in the thumb, and on the left side of her chest, puncturing a lung.
“I noticed that the knife dropped, and I rushed to stand up enough to reach the emergency latch,” she recalled. “Once it finally opened I threw myself out of the ambulance onto the ground.
“Then because we were [close to] the hospital all of my coworkers and the security from the hospital ran over to help,” she continued.
Graphic video footage of the aftermath of the stabbing shows Fatum on the ground screaming and sobbing, while first responders tell Garcia to “back off” and put his hands down. Garcia was held in the vehicle until cops arrived and arrested him.
He was charged with second-degree attempted murder and assault with a weapon. He pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail at Rikers Island.
Fatum underwent three surgeries in a week at Mt. Sinai.
Today, she still struggles with nerve damage in her left arm. The severed nerves “may never come back,” Fatum said.
She also suffers from psychological trauma.
“With something like this, of course you’re going to have lingering PTSD, nightmares. It’s definitely there.”
Fatum said she’s heard of at least 10 random attacks on other emergency workers in the Big Apple since her own — and is going public now to fight for better protections for first responders.
“Not all the cases of violence against [EMTs] get as much attention because mine was more severe than a lot of them, but it happens every day – from being spit on to being punched to being stabbed,” she explained. “It makes me angry.”
In 2023, there were 214 attacks on FDNY EMTs — up a disturbing 20% from the 179 in 2022.
The figures, however, don’t represent assaults on EMS workers employed by hospitals.
“We can’t stop someone from walking up and randomly punching someone in the face, but there are certain things that we could change,” said Fatum, who is still employed by Mt. Sinai and NYU Hospitals, which are part of the city’s 911 system.
Fatum has launched an online petition calling for six measures to improve safety for emergency medical workers, including “issuing all EMS providers bullet and stab proof vests, and offering self-defense courses to all EMS providers.”
The April 30 petition, which has received 417 signatures so far, also calls for “an increase in criminal penalties for those found guilty of assaulting EMS Providers.”
Fatum vowed to not let the life-altering attack prevent her from moving forward in the healthcare field.
“Trying to find a new daily way of life for myself has been challenging. Lately I’ve been trying to study before school starts,” said Fatum, who is beginning a physician’s assistant program at Rutgers University in August.
“My main goals right now are to continue my recovery and finish PA school. Hopefully, in 3 years after school finishes I can start a new chapter of my life as a PA,” she said.