New York subway shooting: one killed, five injured

A Fire Department spokesperson described four of the five injuries as serious

New York Police walk through the Mount Eden subway station while investigating a shooting. Photograph: New York Police Department via AP
New York Police walk through the Mount Eden subway station while investigating a shooting. Photograph: New York Police Department via AP

One person was killed and five others were injured in a shooting at a New York City subway station during the Monday evening commute, police have said.

The shooting occurred at 4.38pm local time at a subway station in the Bronx, police said, adding a man in his 30s was killed.

A Fire Department spokesperson described four of the five injuries as serious.

“The train was coming and there were two kids yelling,” witness Efrain Feliciano (61), told the Daily News.

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“There were at least six shots.”

“I saw sparkles as the bullets hit the wall,” Mr Feliciano said. “A woman was holding a child screaming.”

Video from television news helicopters showed a subway train stopped at the station and orange evidence cones on the platform, which is three stops north of Yankee Stadium.

Trains were still running through the station on an express track, but were not stopping as police investigated.

Fear of violence on the subway system spiked after a string of incidents in recent years, but overall, crime in New York City has been plummeting since a surge at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The number of people shot citywide dropped 39 per cent last year compared to 2022. Killings on the subway system also dropped last year, from 10 to five. - AP

New York City police said on Monday six people had been shot at a subway station in the Bronx, with one person dead and another five wounded.

A spokeswoman for the New York Police Department said by phone that no arrests had been made in the shooting and that it was not clear what condition the five injured people were in. Local media, citing unnamed police sources, r
eported the five sustained non-life threatening injuries.

The most recent data shows crime remains rare on New York's subway system: about 3.8 million trips are taken on the 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. - Reuters