A fight inside a subway car between teenagers ended in tragedy at the Mount Eden Avenue station in the Bronx. When the doors opened and already on the platform, someone from that group pulled out a gun and opened fire, resulting in a 34-year-old man dead and five wounded, including a boy and a girl aged 15 and 14.
The shooter fled, although, according to police data, the search would target two possible suspects. There were a dozen travelers at the station, most of whom made up the injured report. This list also included two women aged 28 and 29, as well as a 71-year-old man. They were in serious condition, but, in principle, there were no fears for their lives.
The shooting was described as an isolated incident, stressed Kaz Daughtry, of the Police Department's (NYPD) operations commission. Daughtry wrote on social media Monday night that “there is no continuing threat.”
Fabien Levy, spokesman for the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, offered reassurance by saying that “do not believe that this is a random attack,” which is the type of violence that arouses the most fear in the population.
The incident occurred on line 4, almost at five in the afternoon. The shooting began on the platform the moment the convoy stopped. While people were leaving the car, the explosions occurred. There were at least ten shots. “I saw splinters when the bullet hit the wall, a woman was holding a child who was crying,” witness Efraín Feliciano told local media.
Terrified people scattered across an elevated platform, above street level, in that area of the South Bronx. A woman expressed her horror when she observed shell casings falling on the asphalt below. Everyone was running. The police and ambulances arrived immediately. The man was even taken to the hospital alive and later died.
The trains stopped stopping at that station and others in the surrounding area. “Shootings like this in the subway system are extremely rare and unacceptable, this is not an example of what happens in the service,” Michael Kemper, head of the police group that monitors this transport, stressed at a press conference.
This homicide was the first to be recorded in that area of the Bronx, when last year, at this same time, there were four. After a significant spike during the Covid pandemic, the number of shootings in New York has continued to decline, NYPD data shows. There were 974 shootings last year, 25% less than in 2022.
Serious crime on the transportation system represents a tiny fraction of total crime in the city, and the chance of being a victim of crime on the subway is statistically low. Some estimates put the mark at 1.8 crimes per million passengers.
This does not mean that a feeling of insecurity was created, even though shootings are rare on subways and buses. Although this figure falls from one year to the next, this feeling of danger increased due to the cases of people pushed onto the tracks and, above all, due to the death of a passenger on line Q in 2022, who He killed a stranger by shooting him without having exchanged a word or a glance.
Last year, a man was shot on a train traveling through lower Manhattan and months later, in Queens, police arrested another for possession of a gun with which he had allegedly shot two homeless people who were trying to rob a woman
And this January, a 45-year-old father and grandfather lost his life on a Line 3 train in Brooklyn, after being shot when he mediated a dispute between two passengers in a car because one was playing music too loudly.
