2 Shot on the Brooklyn subway during evening rush hour, police say

A gunman shot a 17-year-old boy and a man in his 40s on a moving subway train as it approached a station in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood during the evening rush hour on Tuesday, police said.

The shooting happened just after 5:30 p.m. on a northbound C train as it pulled into the Ralph Avenue station, police said.

The 17-year-old suffered an injury to his right hand and was taken to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, police said. The man was shot in the left ankle and taken to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, police said. Both were in stable condition Tuesday evening, police said.

It is unclear whether the shooter, who fled the scene, and the victims knew each other. No arrests had been made as of Tuesday evening and the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the shooting, including what caused it, continued, police said.

The shooting prompted the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the New York City subway system, to keep the C trains running northbound between Broadway Junction and Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets for about two hours while the investigation continued.

After spiking during the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of shootings in New York City has continued to decline since last year, police data shows.

The data shows that shootings are down about 25 percent through Nov. 26 compared to the same period in 2022; the number of shooting victims fell by about 28 percent.

Major crimes on New York’s public transportation account for a small portion of the city’s total crime, and the likelihood of becoming a victim of crime on the subway is statistically low. An analysis by The New York Times in October estimated the rate of violent crime in the system at about 1.8 per million rides.

Gunfire on the city’s subways and buses is rare. Through Nov. 26, the police department’s Transit Bureau had reported five shootings this year, compared to nine during the same period in 2022.