New York: One person was killed and five others were injured Monday in a shooting at the Mount Eden Avenue subway station in the Bronx, police said.
The shooting was an isolated event, Kaz Daughtry, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner of operations, wrote in a social media post Monday evening, adding, “There is no ongoing threat.”
Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams, wrote on social media that the mayor had been briefed on the shooting and that “we do not believe this to be a random attack.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul wrote on social media that she had directed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the subways, to support the police investigation.
No. 4 trains were bypassing the station in both directions while the police investigated, and northbound No. 4 trains were also skipping several nearby stations, according to transit officials.
After spiking during the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of shootings in New York City has continued to fall, Police Department data shows. There were 974 shootings in the city last year, a 25 per cent decline from 2022, according to the data.
Major felonies on New York’s transit system account for a tiny fraction of the city’s overall crime rate, and the chances of falling victim to crime in the subway are statistically low. An analysis by The New York Times in October estimated the rate of violent crimes in the system to be about 1.8 per 1 million rides.
Gunfire on the city’s subway and buses is rare. Last year, the Police Department’s Transit Bureau reported five shootings as of Nov. 26, compared with nine in the same period in 2022.
But several of the shootings in 2022 — including the killing of a 48-year-old man by a stranger on a Sunday morning Q train and a mass shooting on a rush-hour N — and other violent crimes in the system helped fuel some New Yorkers’ concerns about whether the subway was safe.
Shootings in the subway last year included one involving a 34-year-old man who was shot early on a Saturday morning in January on a moving train in lower Manhattan and another in which a Queens man was charged with criminal possession of a weapon after, police said, he fired two shots at a homeless man who was trying to rob a woman at a Manhattan station.
Last month, a 45-year-old father and grandfather who worked as a crossing guard was fatally shot aboard a No. 3 train in Brooklyn after intervening in a dispute between two other passengers over loud music in the car, police said.