Penn panic
TRAIN STATION RUCKUS—
COPS USING a stun gun on a man during an arrest sparked pandemonium on Friday at a jam-packed Penn Station, already overcrowded thanks to a stalled train.
Frightened travelers who feared that a shooting had taken place stampeded through the transit hub after Amtrak police confronted the man and shocked him with a Taser around 6:30 p.m.
“We were sitting on the ground and all of a sudden we heard this loud noise and everyone started sprinting,” said 24-year-old Aubrey Moore, who was waiting on a train to Albany. “It sounded like a gunshot, but nobody knew what was going on, so I just sprinted.”
The havoc followed a harrowingly long afternoon for more than 1,000 passengers who had just arrived at Penn after being trapped on a New Jersey Transit train for nearly three hours.
Some commuters cowered behind pillars and garbage cans as others dropped bags, phones and other belongings and scattered throughout the terminal.
FDNY officials said 16 people received minor injures in the stampede, 12 of whom were taken to hospitals.
Anna Renzi, 24, and her family were waiting out a long delay on her trip home to Washington, D.C., at Häagen-Dazs in the concourse level when crowds began streaming by.
“I thought I heard someone yell ‘shooter,’ that’s why I threw my nephew behind a counter and jumped over and they just had us hide in the storage closet because I had the kids,” Renzi said.
The scare even spread across 34th St. as shoppers streamed out of Macy’s flagship Herald Square store.
“Just had to evacuate @Macys in Herald Square. Lots of cops and ambulances. Ran down 7 flight of stairs. No idea what’s going on,” shopper Betsy Weber tweeted.
The store was briefly evacuated, but cops soon gave the all clear, a Macy’s spokeswoman said.
“We received several dozen 911 calls from Penn Station and on 34th street from Seventh Avenue to Broadway. All of those calls were determined to be unfounded,” said NYPD Chief William Morris, commanding officer of Manhattan South.
Video of the arrest in Penn shows four cops pinning a man on the ground and placing him in handcuffs. Amtrak said Friday night the man was in police custody.
Earlier, 1,200 commuters were trapped for nearly three hours on a New Jersey Transit train from Trenton.
The train became disabled in the Hudson River tunnel late Friday afternoon, when Amtrak was experiencing overhead power problems.The delay led to cancellations and delays for NJ Transit, Amtrak and LIRR trains just a week after a minor derailment led to days of service disruptions.