Fight video shows portrait of NYC subway and city above
NEW YORK — It always seems to start the same way. “I’ll beat you up!” A brush-fire confrontation between strangers in a subway skyrockets toward hostility before anyone else is even sure who is yelling at whom, or why.
A moment so familiar that other passengers hardly bother to look up from their phones.
But a fight Thursday on a speeding A train in Brooklyn that started with such a taunt did not end there. It continued to escalate among a rushhour crowd, from words to fists to a blade to, finally, a gun.
The encounter caught on video came just over a week after New York’s governor took the extraordinary step of ordering the National Guard below ground to make the trains feel safer. The shooting undermined the city’s message that riding the subway is, statistically speaking, quite safe.
The episode fueled a sense of futility about a system that seems to catch all the troubles from the city above — mental health crises, illegal guns — and squeezes them into crowded steel tubes.
For those on that A train Thursday, some with small children at their side, no city statistic is likely to bring comfort. Send the police, send in the Guard — many have come to believe that, regardless, the subway is going to be the subway.
Videos of fights or shootings are everywhere, and they come and they go. This one, with its familiar rhythms, stands out.
The shooting Thursday is not just a crazy thing that happened on an A train one day. It seems more like a clear display of the state of the city above, a sense of metropolitan anxiety. A broken little piece of a place that made its way below ground for everyone to see.
The video begins after whatever kicked off the encounter. A man in dark clothing and a ball cap relentlessly hurls taunt after taunt at a silent man who is sitting. Sometimes, he leans over the man, shouting.
The train drives on without pause along an express track with extended gaps between stations. No one seems to care about a level of hostility that would never be allowed to escalate on other forms of transportation — on an airplane, for example.
Finally, the seated man, seemingly done taking abuse, rises and crouches into a fighting stance. Passengers decide it is time to back away, pushing to the opposite end of the car.
The two men fight and tumble onto an empty bench. But then a young woman darts out and seems to cut the yelling man in the back. “You stabbed me?” he asks her with genuine surprise.
Then the bleeding man rises and shrugs off his jacket. He reaches down and pulls from the jacket’s pocket a gun. He confronts the other man, but the video cuts away. Four shots echo.
The A train finally arrives at a station.
The bleeding man was last seen on the video holding a gun and walking toward the other man. But seconds later, it was he who was shot, in the head, after the other man apparently grabbed his gun, police said.