Man Keeps Posing As N.Y. Transit Worker

NEW YORK – A man who has been arrested 20 times for illegally posing as a subway motorman, bus driver or transit token taker has been arrested again – this time for walking through a rail yard carrying several sets of transit keys and wearing a worker’s vest and hard hat, police said.

Darius McCollum, 39, was on parole after serving prison time for his last arrest when transit police found him Friday in the rail yard for Long Island Rail Road.

He was accused of trying to take a locomotive and train from the yard in the New York borough of Queens and was charged with attempted grand larceny, criminal impersonation and other offenses, prosecutors said.

There was no answer Monday after hours at the office of a lawyer who represented McCollum at the arraignment on Saturday.

It was unclear how McCollum got the uniform and several sets of keys, including ones that would give him access to trains, said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The agency was investigating.

In 2001, McCollum pleaded guilty to an incident the previous year in which, posing as a transit supervisor, he tripped a switch that caused a subway train to stop. He was sentenced to 2 1/2 to five years in prison and paroled in April.

Although McCollum has not been diagnosed, some medical experts said they believe he suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a mental condition characterized by obsessive and anti-social behavior.

McCollum has never worked as a paid transit employee. His mother, Elizabeth McCollum, once said that by the time he was 8 he had memorized the city subway system and could direct a person to any point on it without consulting a map or guide.