Subway Passenger New York City 1941art Photograph
After a Gunman Seemed to Vanish, These New Yorkers Helped End the Search
Witnesses, video, police force accounts and court records draw a troubled human's advisedly planned set on, and the lucky breaks he seized to cook dorsum into the urban center.
The human lumbered into the Kings Highway subway station in Brooklyn, wearing a yellow difficult hat and reflective rubber jacket, dragging a rolling duffel bag and clutching a backpack. He swiped his MetroCard at a turnstile, and when it didn't let him through, he flagged the agent in a nearby berth.
The amanuensis pressed a button to unlock an emergency go out door, and the man and his gear entered the subway organization. It was half dozen:12 a.m. on Tuesday, April 12.
By midmorning, terror and chaos would seize a nearby stretch of Sunset Park, locking down a busy S Brooklyn avenue and halting or rerouting unabridged subway lines. Images of violence and disorder filled phone screens — bright pools of claret on a station platform's greyness flooring; law helicopters thrumming high overhead, unnervingly however in the morning rain.
The attack was the worst on the subway in decades, and information technology came as New York wrestled with questions about public safety, both under and in a higher place footing. During the 31-hour manhunt that followed — documented through witnesses, surveillance videos, law accounts and court records — rattled New Yorkers, many missing piece of work or worried for their children in school, were called upon to help capture a doubtable who seemed to somehow disappear into the vast metropolis.
It all began with a perfectly unremarkable entrance through that door. A structure worker, starting his day.
The station serves the N train, which begins at Coney Island and snakes through Brooklyn on its way to Manhattan and Queens. It runs to a higher place ground at Kings Highway, crawling through a graffiti-lined trench cutting into Gravesend and nearby neighborhoods for the adjacent several stops. Then it slips below basis, into the organization's dark tunnels.
Prototype
The construction worker had been in the system for virtually ii hours, but at some point he boarded the N. His train arrived at 59th Street in Brooklyn'due south Sunset Park neighborhood around eight:twenty a.m.
The doors opened, and closed, and the railroad train pulled away. The structure worker was sitting at the rear of the 2d car. He stood and pulled on a gas mask. He removed a canister from one of his bags, and smoke billowed out into the subway car. "Oops," he said, according to a rider standing nearby. "My bad."
He pulled out a handgun.
The train continued on, its conductor unaware of what was happening in the 2nd car. Information technology rumbled up the express track, passing stations on the parallel local line. Eric Acevedo, a teacher on his way to school in the Williamsburg department, stood at ane of those stations, 45th Street, chatting on the telephone with his sister, when the N came by, and he noticed the lights in the second car suddenly go dark.
Above the din of the railroad train, he heard iii shots — pop! popular! pop! A window shattered. I never heard a railroad train make that sound, he idea. He turned to the stranger beside him and said, "That doesn't sound good."
Paradigm
Within the car, a New York nightmare in an era of mass shootings was unfolding. Fume filled the air as the gunman fired shot afterwards shot after shot. There were about 35 people in the car, and those who tried to flee through the exits at the front and rear found them locked.
"I'm pregnant!" i woman shouted. Another rider, Houari Benkada, 27, on his way to work at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, went to help her and was knocked aside past a blitz of passengers. And then he felt searing pain — a bullet had hit him behind his knee joint.
The railroad train stopped in a tunnel — traffic. For riders in the next cars, the scene through the window was horrific — smoke and gunshots and screams.
Passengers in the next motorcar — the first on the railroad train — banged on the railroad train operator'south locked door. The operator, David Artis, looked back and saw smoke in the second car as passengers told him that a gunman had opened burn down. He chosen in the shooting over his radio.
Finally, the railroad train rolled into the 36th Street station. The doors opened, and smoke and frantic passengers poured out. Some savage haemorrhage to the floor; some ran away. Some stayed to help; some filmed with their phones.
The R train that Mr. Acevedo had been waiting for had since arrived at the same station, getting in that location before the N. It stood waiting, doors open.
Mr. Acevedo saw the fume and the frantic people. A adult female beside him grabbed his arm and said, "There was a shooting — I saw a lady haemorrhage." He began to shout toward the platform: "Go on the train! Become on the train! Stop recording!"
In the chaos, one man — the attacker — seemed to have a plan. While dozens of people ran or fell, he transformed. He left the N train car, speedily shed his gas mask and structure outfit — the helmet, the jacket — and dropped his belongings on the platform.
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And as victims and survivors from the second motorcar raced to the closest cars on the parallel R train, the gunman may take made his way further downward, toward the middle cars. It had been only a few moments since the shooting stopped, just the gunman had become another fleeing passenger, riding the same train equally the people he had only shot.
Just like that, the R train had become a means of escape for the victims and their assailant.
Jordan Alzos-Benke, 41, and his 3-yr-old son, Spiro, were in their customary spot toward the center of the R — on the sixth car, to be exact, chosen because information technology is the closest to the leave at their destination station. Mr. Alzos-Benke was taking Spiro to school and chatting with some other parent when he sensed a commotion further up the platform. Several people spilled into his car.
The train left the station.
Father and son were getting off at the adjacent stop, but an imposing effigy now stood between them and the door. "I'thou looking at this heavyset Black guy who'southward 6 feet-ish tall, my height," Mr. Alzos-Benke said later. "I would have remembered that guy on any day on that train. It was a big guy in my way as I was trying to get off the train."
The train stopped at 25th Street. The big man, dressed head to toe in dark clothing, moved to get off — a relief for Mr. Alzos-Benke and a familiar feeling to whatsoever parent herding small children on and off the subway. "I'm similar, great, he will clear a path for us," Mr. Alzos-Benke said. "He'll push through and whoever may be blocking the door volition get out of his way."
Merely then his son darted in front end of the man.
"I'm holding Spiro's paw, but the guy is between me and Spiro," Mr. Alzos-Benke said. "I kind of wait upwards at him, and very politely he'southward similar, 'Subsequently you.'"
An announcement said the train would be held in the station. People flooded off, and the commotion was plenty that Mr. Alzos-Benke said several parents picked upwards their children. Backside him, Mr. Acevedo feared a stampede.
Epitome
"At-home down New York! The shooting was at 36th Street! Be civilized!" Mr. Acevedo shouted. Beside him, a woman was crying. "I was told there was a bomb on the R railroad train," she said.
Every bit Mr. Alzos-Benke led his son to the crowded stairs up to the street, he saw the same stranger from his car, hurrying up the steps past the slower line of people to his right. By the time Mr. Alzos-Benke got to street level, he was focused on getting his son to schoolhouse, and he lost rails of the man. He would report his sighting to the law later that mean solar day.
Back at 36th Street, police officers and firefighters were descending into the station. They blocked access in and out, unaware that the gunman was already gone. The casualties were quickly tallied — ten wounded by gunshots, none gravely. Information technology was an outcome as welcome as information technology was unlikely, because that someone had just fired 33 shots into a locked metal tube crowded with trapped targets, and had and so vanished.
Mayor Eric Adams was uptown at his Gracie Mansion residence, attending a Covid-xix briefing over Zoom when he learned of the shooting. He had tested positive for the coronavirus ii days earlier, and had been restricted to his dwelling house since then.
A one-time New York Metropolis police captain, his first instinct was to blitz to the scene, only members of his staff urged otherwise. Instead, a command middle was fix in a different room. Soon, he said later, he was in nigh-constant contact with Constabulary Commissioner Keechant Sewell.
The news swept across the urban center and far beyond. Panicked parents texted from beyond the country: The news said Brooklyn, are you OK? Helicopters took to the skies over Dusk Park, and the metropolis blasted alerts to smartphones asking people to avoid the neighborhood.
But the gunman seemed to have only walked away, making his fashion uphill from Fourth Avenue to Seventh Avenue, where, a police force enforcement official said, he boarded a double-decker that carried him the x or so densely populated blocks to another subway station. At 9:xv a.m., he descended the stairs at that station, the 7th Avenue-9th Street stop in Park Slope, where an F or G train could take him out to Coney Island or into Manhattan or Queens.
At the 36th Street station, the items the gunman had left behind proved to exist a trove of clues. A cache of fireworks, a gun, a container of gasoline, a torch — and bank cards and the key to a U-Haul van. The gun was quickly traced to a purchase a decade earlier in Ohio, sold to a human being named Frank Robert James.
The name matched the ane on the bank cards. Mr. James was 62 and had recently been staying in Philadelphia.
Paradigm
More breaks seemed to come up investigators' way. The police found the U-Haul before long later four:thirty p.chiliad. Tuesday, parked in Gravesend almost the Kings Highway subway station. The news panicked Mr. Adams.
"If you're old enough, anytime you hear 'U-Booty,' y'all think of Timothy McVeigh," he said later, referring to the man who detonated a bomb in a Ryder truck in Oklahoma City in 1995. A search of the U-Haul revealed a propane tank, just no explosives.
Some other break: A rider who had been on the N train and had seen the gunman said it was the aforementioned homo captured in a surveillance photograph showing him dressed like a construction worker that morning, entering that station.
By the belatedly afternoon on Tuesday, confident that Mr. James was nearly likely the man in the gas mask, the constabulary decided to release his name and picture, and to refer to him every bit a person of interest. The Police Department posted the name and photos on Twitter at 7:55 p.thousand.
Little is known almost where Mr. James went in the almost xi hours after he entered the Park Slope station — if anywhere. At least one witness told the regime that she spotted a human being matching Mr. James's description sitting in the station equally late as 5:xl p.1000. in a night baseball cap and with a dark purse nearby. He let at least two trains go by without boarding.
Mr. Adams ordered police force officers who worked that solar day's shift to stay on overnight. Quietly, he also chosen police officials well-nigh whether several other shootings that night — five in three hours in the Bronx lonely — might exist linked to the subway assault.
That evening, city officials discussed the possibility of broadcasting some other telephone alert, like the one that had warned people to stay away from the surface area of the shooting on Tuesday. This fourth dimension, the goal would exist to spread Mr. James'southward proper name and face — in effect deputizing every New Yorker with a smartphone by giving them their own personal wanted affiche. Although rare, such alerts had been issued during other city emergencies — including the attack past the so-chosen Chelsea Bomber in 2016.
Officials with the urban center'south Office of Emergency Management expressed discomfort over such a widespread alarm for someone classified only as a person of interest. The officials agreed to send the alert if he was identified as a suspect in the shooting.
Dark fell over the city, just by sunup on Wednesday, in that location were no new leads.
Early that morning, Michael Colina, the morning host on WNYC, the city's National Public Radio affiliate, announced that Mr. Adams was expected to call in at 8:30 a.m. Shortly after, the mayor did, and rapidly cut to the point.
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"We have now upgraded the person of interest to being a suspect," the mayor said.
Mr. Hill asked a question that seemed to exist on the minds of many New Yorkers: "Mr. Mayor, how close are police to locating suspect Frank James? Why is information technology seeming to have so long? It's 24 hours after this incident."
Mr. Adams replied that in fact, the investigation was proceeding quickly and praised it every bit "practiced, old-fashioned police work."
"Being able to identify the van, beingness able to place his social media channels, using all the pieces together to this puzzle," he connected. "This is really an amazing turnaround with the lack of data that we had."
With Mr. James named as a suspect, urban center officials sent the telephone alert most him that had been prepared during the previous dark's discussions. At ten:21 a.m., smartphones beyond the city shrieked with the alarm and a link to his image.
At that very time, a 17-year-former male child on a school field trip in Chinatown noticed a heavyset human being sitting on a bench — just sitting. Not looking at a phone, non eating or drinking. The teen, Jack Griffin, had seen pictures of Mr. James, and this man looked but like him. He discreetly photographed him and posted on Twitter at x:29 a.m.
"Possible frank james sighting?" he wrote in a message posted alongside two images. He tagged #FrankJames and #lowereastside. After about thirty minutes, he said later, he also called Crime Stoppers.
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The constabulary returned his call more than two hours later, at 1:20 p.chiliad., and the Crime Stoppers business relationship on Twitter replied likewise, asking the teen where he had seen the homo. By then, Mr. James had entered a McDonald'due south several blocks away, on Offset Avenue in the East Village.
For some 14 hours since Tuesday night, New Yorkers had been shown the face of Frank James, over and over in their social media feeds and on their screeching phones, urging people to call if they saw him.
Thirty-one hours after the smoke and gunfire, another call arrived at Offense Stoppers, this time from the McDonald'south in the E Hamlet. The caller had seen the pictures all over, and recognized them. He said his name was Frank James, and he understood they were looking for him.
Chelsia Rose Marcius , Troy Closson , Karen Zraick , Michael Aureate and Julia Carmel contributed reporting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/nyregion/brooklyn-subway-shooter-nypd-manhunt.html
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