Hammer-attack suspect in custody

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.

The puzzling case - which police sources described as the random work of a mentally unstable man - almost drew to a close yesterday.

The sources said that the suspect, whom they wouldn't identify - a bearded, husky, 5-foot-9 black man in his 30s - surrendered to a local mental institution in the morning.

He will be released into police custody after a psychiatric evaluation and charged with aggravated assault, attempted murder and related offenses, police sources said.

While it appears that commuters can breathe a little sigh of relief with the subway psycho off the streets, some questions still linger.

It's unclear what prompted the suspect, who hid his weapon in a black-and-yellow school bag, to attack Taylor.

The two men didn't "exchange any words or improper glances or anything" when they boarded the train at City Hall, said Capt. Sharon Seaborough, of Central Detectives.

The attacker spent the early portion of the subway ride affectionately kissing and talking with a little boy at his side. SEPTA surveillance footage showed him directing the boy to an open seat before he attacked Taylor, and then fleeing with the boy after the attack.

"I didn't notice anybody," Taylor said. "I was in my own world, just tired from work. I don't even know if he said anything [during the attack] because my headphones were on."

Investigators expressed dismay that at least 10 passengers watched the attack without intervening.

Taylor said that a female passenger sat with him after he was beaten and even accompanied him to Temple University Hospital, where he received eight staples on his head, six stiches on his neck and treatment for a broken finger.

Taylor's mother, Tracie Taylor, said that she later learned that a passenger stole her son's cell phone, which fell to the floor during the attack, and sold it to a teenage girl for $150.

"Honestly, that didn't matter to me as much," Tracie Taylor said.

"I was more devastated watching this deranged person try to kill my son." *

Staff writer Christine Olley contributed to this report.