At least 23 wounded, 10 of them by shot, is the last balance of the shooting caused by a man on Tuesday at rush hour in the NYC subway, the police announced, who asked for citizen collaboration to find the suspect.
“We have been lucky that it was not much worse than it has been,” said New York police head, Kechant Sewell at a press conference.
The police offer a $50,000 reward for for information related to the perpetrator, who ran away in the middle of chaos.
#CRIMESTOPPERS pic.twitter.com/FsGIYDaZB1
— NYPD Crime Stoppers (@NYPDTips) April 13, 2022
The police are following the track of a 62-year-old man who rented a vehicle in Philadelphia. It was located on Tuesday afternoon in Brooklyn, with the car keys found at the incident place, local authorities said.
It’s a corpulent black man, who wore a nylon and green nylon construction vest, and whose photo was spread at the press conference.
The attack occurred at 08h24 (12h24 GMT), in full peak hour, in a busy line of the NYC Subway that joins southern Brooklyn with Manhattan. “10 people were injured by a bullet and another 13 suffered inhalation of smoke, falls, or panic attacks,” the police said.
The witnesses described a dark-skinned man sitting on the second subway wagon who wore a nylon vest orange and gray and a hooded gray sweatshirt and surgical mask activated two smoke pomegranates when the train entered the station “36 Street “.
“He held a nine-millimeter pistol and shot at least 33 times injuring 10 people,” the police said, who found a pistol of these characteristics in the place.
Photos and videos of passengers on social networks showed blood on the floor and people lying on the floor of the train and on the platform of “36th Street” station.
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“Planned”
Threstan Ralph, 34, Brooklyn’s inhabitant told AFP the moment when he arrived at the station. “I saw a cloud of smoke, I saw people in chaos, people lying down, three people on the floor. I immediately told myself that I had to leave.”
“People shouted ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Why (did he) shot?’ I did not know what was happening,” he added.
Another passenger, Yav Montano, explained to CNN that there was an “explosion of a grenade of smoke… a bomb, about two minutes before we arrived at the station.”
“It seemed like it was planned (…). We were blocked in the car (…) There was a lot of blood on the ground,” he added.
A firefighters spokesman specified to AFP that “unknown explosive artifacts” were found in place, although none “worked”, according to the police.
The security forces cordoned the NYC Subway station, located on 36th Street and 4th Avenue in the south of Brooklyn, near the Greenwood Cemetery.
Several Brooklyn schools suspended the outings of their students abroad.
Weapons proliferation
Although photos of the man who rented the truck were disseminated, the police did not specify whether it is the actual suspect. According to several media, the man would be Frank James, 62, and would have published several videos on YouTube with long and sometimes violent political diatribes, criticizing the Mayor of New York, Eric Adams.
This is Frank James who is a person of interest in this investigation. Any information can be directed to @NYPDTips at 800-577-TIPS. pic.twitter.com/yBpenmsX67
— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) April 12, 2022
“There were publications that could be related to the person who interests us, which mentions the street inhabitants, New York and Mayor Adams,” confirmed the boss of the local police.
Confined by COVID-19, the Mayor promised to “stop and prosecute” the author of the shooting, before slamming the proliferation of weapons in the country: more than “400 million” in private hands, he remembered.
The homicide rate in the United States “is 26 times higher” than in other developed countries, said the Mayor, who was elected with the promise to offer security to the almost nine million inhabitants of the US financial capital.
On Monday, President Joe Biden announced new measures against the proliferation of firearms that killed 45,000 people in 2021 in the country, according to the Gun Violence Archive organization. The White House often speaks of an “Epidemic”.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City has experienced an increase in crime. The number of homicides went from 319 to 488 in 2021, even though the annual balance is far from the 2,000 that occurred in the early 1990s.
In the first quarter of 2022, the number of shootings and shots in New York passed from 260 to 296 compared to the same period of 2021, according to police data released last week.
“We are tired of reading the great headlines against crime, be it a shooting, the loss of a teenager, or a 13-year-old girl. This must stop,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul, about several recent shooting victims (among them minors) or bullets lost.
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