Man, 34, killed at Bronx station in afternoon shooting police say was prompted by argument between two teen groups

An argument between two groups of teenagers left one person killed and five others injured in a shooting at a New York subway station on Monday, police said.

The shooting started after the train’s doors opened on the elevated platform at the Mount Eden Avenue station in The Bronx at about 4.38pm – a time when stations throughout the city are filled with kids returning from school and when many workers are beginning their evening commute.

A 34-year-old man was killed. The wounded included a 14-year-old girl, 15-year-old boy and three adults of 28, 29 and 71. Some of the victims were believed to have been involved in the dispute and others were bystanders waiting for the train, police said, describing four of the injuries as seriou

“We don’t believe this was a random shooting. We do not believe that this was an individual indiscriminately firing into a train or a train station,” NYPD’s chief of transit, Michael Kemper, said at a news conference.

Police are searching for at least one shooter, who fled the scene, but have not ruled out the possibility of multiple suspects.

The station is in the Bronx, at the intersection of Mount Eden and Jerome Avenues.

The gunfire sent passengers rushing off the train while people on the platform scrambled for safety.

“The train was coming and there were two kids yelling,” a witness, Efrain Feliciano, 61, told the New York Daily News. “There were at least six shots.”

“I saw sparkles as the bullets hit the wall,” he added. “A woman was holding a child screaming.”

Video from television news helicopters showed a subway train stopped at the station and orange evidence cones on the elevated platform.

“It was total pandemonium,” Luis Rodriguez, 34, told the New York Post. “It makes you scared to ride the train.”

The most recent data shows crime remains rare on New York’s subway system: about 3.8m trips are taken on the system on an average weekday, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reported 570 felony assaults in all of 2023.

Shootings are especially uncommon: in 2022, when a man with a handgun injured 10 people on a train passing through Brooklyn, it was the first mass shooting attack on the subway system since 1984.

A few weeks later, a man shot dead 48-year-old Daniel Enriquez on a Q train in what police said was an unprovoked attack.

Fears of how dangerous the subway really is among passengers jumped early in the pandemic, when the subway crime rate spiked in early 2020, but fell back to normal levels in 2021. Riders’ perceptions of the dangers remain high, even in the face of falling crime rates.

Calling in to 1010 Wins radio after the shooting, Mayor Eric Adams touted the work police have done to get guns off the street and reduce violence. But he said more needs to be done to make people comfortable riding a system still coming back from major ridership losses during the worst pandemic years.

“Not only people must be actually safe, but what we have done in lowering crime, they must feel safe,” Adams, a Democrat, said, “and something like this can send shockwaves throughout our entire system.”

Source: The Guardian.