The elderly woman in a wheelchair that made waves across social media for smoking a cigar filled with marijuana on a New York City subway may have once been insanely wealthy.
The 60-year-old woman, Michelle Carter, was once a millionaire, The New York Post reports. Carter was deemed mentally ill by physicians in 2005 after she fell into the path of an incoming train, causing her to lose both of her legs below the knee.
Rejecting the doctor’s diagnoses, Carter sued the city Transit Authority the following year, arguing that the incident was not a suicide attempt, but rather she had been pushed against her will onto the train tracks. The Transit Authority claimed, like the physicians, that Carter was attempting suicide.
The woman then rolled around the streets of New York City for some eight years. Her wandering days were over in 2014, when the Transit Authority agreed to give Carter $4 million to settle the incident.
Two years later, in 2016, she sat in court once again without a penny to her name. While some of the money was likely spent by Carter, a great deal of it was actually stolen from her. A thief snatched her bag containing a cashier’s check for $886,339.96 while Carter was sitting at Penn Station in 2015.
After reporting the theft to the police, Carter found out the thief had cashed the check at a local JP Morgan Chase branch in the name of a fake corporation. For its part, JP Morgan has failed to release the name of the individual, the Post reports.
A cell phone video went viral in early January that shows Carter rolling up and smoking a blunt on an M train. The woman argues with a young male passenger before getting thrown off the train. (RELATED: Woman In Wheelchair Lights Blunt Up On Train)
As Carter yells at the male passenger, he gets increasingly hostile, even going so far as to make physical threats.
“GET THE F@CK OFF MY TRAIN!” the passenger screams at Carter. “I’ll smack you and that hat, and that blunt,” he says, according to the New York Post. “Everybody on this train, I’m decking that b!tch…Word, gangsta.”
After the passenger yells, the video clips to Carter sprawled out on the subway station floor with her belongings strewn everywhere. It is unclear if it was the passenger, or law enforcement, that threw her off the train.
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