Visions of musical grandeur mixed with homophobic rants in the mind of a troubled panhandler busted for stabbing a stranger who turned down a demand for cash outside a Manhattan subway station, court documents showed.
David Trotman, 38, charged early Tuesday with wounding a 76-year-old travel agent at the Herald Square subway stop, once denounced gay inmates as “pink poodles,” with federal court documents further alleging he sent envelopes smeared with feces and blood to a prosecutor.
“Beyond the simply disgusting nature, this practice is dangerous and creates a health hazards,” the court papers stated, adding that the scanner used to record the documents needed to be sanitized by hand.
The defendant bizarrely described himself as a “very successful urban rap artist” while complaining a corrections officer had stolen his mix tapes “Creepy Hollow” and “Illest Eve” during one of his prison stays.
Trotman alleged in a dismissed lawsuit that there was a conspiracy to submarine his musical aspirations, claiming prison workers and inmates were involved in torpedoing his non-existent “rap career.”
Sunday night’s random and unprovoked stabbing left travel agent Iqbal Ahmed seriously injured and left suspect’s uncle Elton Trotman to explain his nephew’s history of psychiatric woes.
The relative, speaking to the Daily News from his Minnesota home, said David Trotman’s mental health issues dated back to 2010 when he was working at the family dry-cleaning business.
“They evaluated him,” recalled Elton Trotman. “They found out he was schizophrenic or whatever. And from then on, he just had patterns of that. Do crazy things — steal cars, live in the street. I knew he was mentally unstable.”
The defendant, prior to his two-year prison stay in 2017 for a Suffolk County conviction on an unauthorized use of a motor vehicle charge, was unable to speak with a Long Island police officer while inside Stony Brook Hospital.
The cop described the defendant as “incapacitated and (he) could not remember due to poly-substance dependence disorder,” court papers read.
The suspect also sent along a bloodstained change of address letter in 2018 during a case in which the court records were “replete with Mr. Trotman’s inappropriate rantings,” authorities said.
The uncle recalled a feeling of unease when David left his home for Philadelphia, and the younger man bounced between his mother’s home there and his dad’s place in New York.
“He was such a beautiful young man,” said Elton Trotman. “My heart is broken about him. He is gentle as a lamb. If he stabbed somebody, he felt threatened in his own mental mind … The David I know had a very good heart.”
He blamed a breakdown in the mental health system for David’s woes, saying his nephew never had the time to properly heal.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/7CULMTS4QVBT5EIJDYG6EFKPEM.jpg)
An August 2020 court document recounted how Trotman “drew a great deal of attention to himself by calling openly gay and ‘closet homosexuals’ mooks & bozos out loud and directly to their faces” while incarcerated.
And he raved that “racist and homosexual corrections officers” with targeting him behind bars.
The Daily News Flash
Weekdays
Catch up on the day’s top five stories every weekday afternoon.
Trotman made similar loony claims when escorted by cops out of the NYPD Transit Bureau at Columbus Circle in handcuffs early Tuesday.
“Caucasians are ignorant people,” he ranted when a Daily News reporter asked about the stabbing. “They suck d— in their sleep. That’s what happened.”
Ahmed was getting better but still in pain as of Monday.
“When I was coming from the stairs, he said, ‘Give me money,’” he said in an exclusive interview from his Bellevue Hospital bed after undergoing emergency surgery. “He did not give me a chance to say anything.”
Previous court papers included a warning over Trotman’s vile mailings, noting he would face “more significant and serious sanctions.” The court clerk cited “sanitary concerns” and said anything mailed by the defendant unrelated to the case “will be destroyed and disposed of without further review.”
Trotman was released from prison in December 2020 after serving the maximum sentence, records show.
His arraignment for the stabbing was pending Tuesday.