By Jonathan Allen and Brad Brooks
NEW YORK CITY (Reuters) -New York City police said they are searching for a gunman who opened fire on a subway train and station platform in the Bronx on Monday, killing one man and injuring five other people.
Gunfire erupted on a northbound train as two groups of teenagers were fighting, New York Police Department (NYPD) officials said during a press conference outside the station where the violence took place. Someone from one of the groups then pulled out a gun.
The first shot was fired inside the train, but all six people shot were on the platform outside the train when hit by bullets, police said. A 34-year-old man died while five others taken to hospitals sustained non-life threatening injuries.
The victims ranged in age from 14 to 71, and included four males and two females.
“To the shooter – you are now the NYPD’s most wanted and you have the greatest detectives in the world looking for you,” said Tarik Sheppard, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of public information. “We suggest you turn yourself in.”
Police and transit system officials at the press conference stressed the shooting was a rare act of the violence on the subway, working to ease fears passengers may have.
Data shows about 3.8 million trips are taken on the on New York’s subway system on an average weekday, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reported 570 felony assaults in all of 2023.
Shootings are especially uncommon: in 2022, when a man with a handgun injured 10 people on a train passing through Brooklyn, it was the first mass shooting attack on the subway system since 1984.
A few weeks later, in May 2022, a man shot dead 48-year-old Daniel Enriquez on a Q train in what police said was an unprovoked attack.
Fears of how dangerous the subway really is among passengers jumped early in the pandemic, when the subway crime rate spiked in early 2020, but fell back to normal levels in 2021. Riders’ perceptions of the dangers remain high, even in the face of falling crime rates.
Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and a former city police captain, has sought to reassure unnerved commuters by increasing the number of police officers in subway stations.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York and Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
