Machete-Wielding Grand Central Slasher Shot by NYPD Was Battle Rapper Known as “Fox 5”

Friends of the machete-wielding attacker shot dead by NYPD cops in Grand Central Station are trying to grapple with how the man they once knew as a battle rap legend fell so far to end up slashing strangers in the subway.

Anthony Griffin, 44, was well known in the Bronx for the freestyle raps he performed under the stage name “Fox 5” before making headlines Saturday for slashing three elderly victims and calling himself “Lucifer” when cops unsuccessfully tried to get him to drop his bloody machete.

“There was always a kind side to him,” Mickey Factz, a fellow rapper and NYU adjunct professor, told the Daily News. “But obviously there were some demons that he could not conquer.”

In an online interview from a few years ago, Griffin cheerfully boasted he would one day be famous in words that now take on a different tone.

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Police said that Griffin, who has a tattoo of the word “Outlaw” on his arm, has been arrested 13 times.

He has no history of mental illness with the department. But friends said he started to ramble and seem mentally unwell around the time his mother died about five years ago.

Griffin appears in YouTube videos from the late 2000s and 2010s squaring up against rappers Miguel Diablo and Reign Man, and was featured in the “2 Raw For the Streets” underground rap video series.

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Police said Griffin targeted his three victims at random. He entered the subway system at the Vernon Blvd. station in Queens around 9:30 a.m. Saturday and took the No. 7 train to Grand Central Station. Once he left the train, he pulled out a machete lunged at an 84-year-old man on the platform, slashing the man’s head and face.

Griffin then moved upstairs to the Nos. 4/5/6 platform, where he attacked a 65-year-old man and a 70-year-old woman, slashing the man’s face and causing an open skull fracture and chopping at the woman’s shoulder, police said.

Two uniformed NYPD Transit detectives ordered him 20 times to drop his weapon but he refused, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said. The cops then offered to help him if he dropped the blade but he advanced on the cops instead, his knife extended, Tisch said.

Griffin referred to himself as “Lucifer” during the clash with cops, according to police.

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