Horror stories unfold on New York’s subway
A cellist was entertaining New York City subway riders in Manhattan when a woman sneaked up behind him and bashed him in the head with his own metal water bottle.
A bystander was killed and five people injured in an afternoon rush-hour shooting at a Bronx subway station, in which police said 19 shots were fired in the train and on the platform, after a brawl broke out between two groups of teenagers. A 16-year-old boy was subsequently apprehended.
A 31-year-old rider was repeatedly struck in the head by a man with a metal pipe at a subway station in Queens borough.
A subway worker at a Manhattan station was punched in the face by a homeless man.
These are some of the violent incidents recorded last week in the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, subway system, by far the largest in the United States.
Transit crime is up 22.6 percent since the start of the year through Feb 11 compared with the corresponding period last year, with felony assaults up more than 10.3 percent, according to New York Police Department statistics.
Five of the six major crime categories — murder, robbery, felony assault, burglary and grand larceny — have increased year-to-date in a CompStat report published by the NYPD on Sunday.
Mayor Eric Adams said on Tuesday that the city is trying to get more funding to restore a program that stationed police officers in the subway on 12-hour shifts.
“We want officers walking through the trains, being at the platforms, being near the token booths and identifying where the crime is actually taking place.
“And we’re seeing a substantial amount of that crime taking place on our subways.
“Proportionally, the number of riders that we have, we are capping over 4 million riders. We have about six felonies a day on our subway system.”
The Feb 13 attack on the cellist, Iain Forrest, 29, at the busy 34th Street-Herald Square station was enough for him to stop performing underground. The assault was captured on video by a spectator recording Forrest’s performance.
“Two attacks in less than a year is two too much,” Forrest said in an Instagram post on Sunday.
“I have been punched, choked, and now bashed in the head.
“I love performing for you all in the subway, but I’m at my breaking point and can’t take more injury or harm.”
An MD-PhD student of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, Forrest said he was one of the many subway performers who have been “attacked, harassed or robbed” while entertaining subway riders.
He suggested that other musicians join the Subway Performers Advocacy Group to demand better security at transit hubs, the New York Post reported.
In a statement, the MTA said, “No one in the transit system, including the musicians, should be subjected to violence, and when the NYPD catches up with the person who committed this senseless attack, they will be held accountable.”
Better security sought
The MTA is replacing fluorescent lighting with LED fixtures at some stations as a security measure.
“Your platforms, mezzanines and staircases will now be lighter and brighter, and that will give a sense of comfort that our system is more safe,” Demetrius Crichlow, senior vice-president of the NYC Transit Department of Subways, was quoted by CBS New York as saying.
“Our hundreds of thousands of cameras that we have throughout the stations will be able to get better images when things happen.”
In another incident, a Brazilian tourist was stabbed in the back at the Queens Plaza station on Feb 15, according to police, the New York Post reported. A stranger ran up to the 29-year-old and slashed him in the neck, it said, citing authorities and sources.
“People get stabbed at the end of this station, sometimes in the elevator,” an MTA worker at the Queens Plaza station told the Post on Monday. “It’s very, very bad.”
On Feb 14, a 16-year-old boy was stabbed in the thigh at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn, police said.
On the same day, a 58-year-old female MTA worker was punched in the face by a homeless man on a Lower Manhattan subway platform — a bystander was also hit when he intervened to help the woman.