The machete-wielding nut who slashed three straphangers and called himself “Lucifer” before police shot him dead at Grand Central Station rapped under the stage name “Fox 5” and fixated on religion in his freestyle lyrics, The Post has learned.
Anthony Griffin, 44, was even pictured posing with a broad-based knife in a photo posted on his Instagram account about a year before the Saturday subway attack, with friends claiming he carried around the machete for protection and admitting he’d struggled with his mental health.
“I’m exhausted …The messiah is tired, bro … I’m a baby, born again, but I’m only 43 and I’m tired, bro,” he said to the camera in an April 2025 clip.
“I ain’t been 33 in nine years. What they did to Jesus at 33 since we are going to play numbers games? What happened at 33 for Jesus?”
In another rap video posted the same month, he claimed he was “gonna live how I wanna” and “even if I smell death around the corner … it’s far from my persona. I’m the God, n—a.”
“We gonna f–k the devil up. He can’t stop this level up,” he rapped repeatedly in another clip.
“When it’s time for revelation, that’s the moment I’ll be up… Satan never held me up. Father never held me back.”
Griffin, a Bronx native who had at least 13 previous arrests, slashed and wounded three elderly victims – two men and a woman – when he went on a rampage with a machete on the uptown Nos. 4,5,6 subway platform around 9:50 a.m. April 11, police said.
He repeatedly claimed that he was “Lucifer” when two NYPD detectives, who were working overtime to provide transit security, confronted him and ordered him to drop the blade 20 times, before fatally shooting him, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.
Members of the rap world said they were shocked, telling The Post Griffin became well-known for his music decades ago.
“That’s not him, him saying ‘Lucifer,’ a machete, that’s not who Fox was,” Atlanta rapper and fellow Bronx native Mickey Factz said Monday.
“He was just a genuine, energetic guy who loved his community and loved to create music. It’s so sad that his mental health took over him.”
Griffin, whose Instagram handle was “almighty_gawdflow,” regularly rambled about religion in social media videos, the last of which appeared to have been posted to his account nearly a year ago.
He also put up a photo of himself seemingly holding a machete in January 2025. Friends told News 12 Griffin carried the blade for what they claimed was protection, but also that he had been suffering from mental health problems.
Griffin still performed in front of small crowds in the past few years, according to his social media.
In a January 2023 YouTube video filmed aboard a subway train, he explained that he’d stopped battle rapping about 13 years earlier, while saying “hip-hop chose me, I didn’t choose hip-hop.”
“God gave me a heartbeat so I already had an instrumental so you know speaking my mind is my freedom. It’s my liberation,” he said, before explaining his “Fox 5” stage name.
“This is before the internet, this is before DVDs, I already named myself Fox 5,” he said, wearing sunglasses and a slouchy cap.
“I knew when I would be a newsflash in the future.”
Factz, the fellow rapper, said Griffin was on a slew of hip hop DVDs from the early 2000s. The two also collaborated with other artists after connecting in 2010.
“He’s always been an eccentric guy. When we were all together to kind of do some hip-hop stuff, he was the most exuberant. He was the most exciting. He had the most energy,” Factz said. “He drew a lot of people in with how he carried himself.”
But Griffin seemed to suffer a sharp mental decline in recent years, Factz said.
“A lot of us who kind of knew him, we never experienced that side of him,” he said.
