Machete-wielding Grand Central attacker shot by cops used to perform freestyle battle raps as “Fox 5”

Friends of the 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.

“I already named myself ‘Fox 5’ knowing I would be a newsflash in the future,” he said. “God gave me a heartbeat so I already had an instrumental. Speaking my mind is my freedom. It’s my liberation.”

Two decades ago, Factz and others looked up to Griffin.

“Via DVDs, in the very early beginning stages of YouTube in 2005, his name was circulating …  And he was pretty known in that very niche space,” Factz said. “He was always the exuberant one in the space. He just always had a little bit more energy than a lot of us that were there.”

While mourning his friend’s death, Factz said he has nothing but sympathy for the victims Griffin wounded.

“Prayers and prayers and prayers to the families who were devastated by such a malicious attack,” Factz said.

Griffin’s long-time friend and rap music colleague Terrell Blair was also shocked by Griffin’s rampage.

“Nobody anticipated anything to that extent,” Blair said. “He has no track record of harming anyone, man. So it’s hard for us.”

“We’ve never seen that side of him,” Blair added. “I knew him since he was, you know, a child, and he’s always had a good heart despite whatever he was dealing with. He used music as a vehicle.”

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.

Blair posted an Instagram video from last summer of Griffin, rapping in the Bronx, his arm draped over Blair as he shared a few verses. They last spoke in December.

“When anybody encounters Fox, be prepared … Fox will want to hold you there. And if he’s dear to you, he wants you to hear his music and he’s gonna give you a few bars,” Blair said. “He usually walks around fully equipped with a little speaker.”

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

The cops opened fire, hitting Griffin twice, then performed CPR on him before medics took him to Bellevue Hospital, where he died.

“He was a man of God, like he followed the Christian belief, and it’s just shocking to see that he was calling himself Lucifer,” said a childhood friend who asked not to be named.

“He was one of them individuals who had a gift with rapping. Like, you give him any topic, sort of like Eminem, and then he just go on. He could go on for hours just rapping about one topic. It was just amazing. It was a gift. Like, a lot of people can’t do that. And he did it with precision. And he was very hilarious also definitely when he rhymed. So he was able to get people to gravitate towards him with his lyrical ability.”