A video captures a searing portrait of the subway and the city above
It always seems to start the same way.
I’ll beat you up!
A confrontation between strangers on a subway skyrockets loudly toward hostility before anyone else is even sure who’s yelling at who, or why.
Come on man! Do something about it!
A moment so familiar that other passengers hardly bother to look up from their phones or interrupt their conversation.
I’m going to beat you up, just you. Only you.
But a fight Thursday on a speeding A train in Brooklyn that started with those insults didn’t end there. Things continued to escalate for the rush hour crowd, from words to fists, from a knife to finally a gun.
The meeting took place just over a week after New York’s governor took the extraordinary step of ordering the National Guard underground to make the trains feel safer. The shooting undermined the city’s message that subway travel is statistically quite safe.
The episode fueled a sense of futility about a system that seemed to take all the problems of the city above — mental health crises, illegal guns — and squeeze them into overcrowded steel tubes.
For those catching a train on Thursday, some with small children at their sides, no city statistic will provide comfort. Send the police, send the guards – many have come to believe that the subway will be the subway no matter what.
Videos of fights or shootings are everywhere, and they come and go. This one, with its familiar rhythms, stands out.
Thursday’s shooting isn’t just something that happened one day on an A train.
It seems more like a clear representation of the state of the city above, a sense of metropolitan dread that has been felt, described and discussed from Flatbush to Fordham and back again. A broken piece of a place that worked its way underground for all to see.
0:01
The video starts after the start of the meeting. Something dropped off a passenger, a man in dark clothing and a cap. He mercilessly hurls one taunt after another at a silent man who is sitting. Sometimes he bends over the man, shouting.
The train continues without a break along a fast track with wide gaps between them. No one seems to care about a level of hostility that could never escalate on other forms of transportation – on an airplane, for example, an environment equally cramped and prone to frustrated passengers. On the subway, menacing shouts could simply be called Thursday.
The woman recording the video makes this point in her own way, pausing to point the camera at her own blank face, unimpressed: Here we go again.
Finally, the seated man, seemingly ready for abuse, stands up and crouches into a fighting stance. The screaming man seems excited about the challenge and springs into action. Only then do a dozen or more nearby passengers collectively decide that it is time to back up and push to the other side of the car.
‘Little things that don’t matter’
Aroldo Gonzalez, 20, knows that moment all too well. The panic, louder than the questions: why? What is happening? – and the need to get away.
In April 2022, Mr. Gonzalez was on an N train in Brooklyn when a man got up from his seat and opened fire. That man, Frank James, shot and wounded Mr. Gonzalez and nine other people, and was convicted and given 10 life sentences.
Mr. González now rides the train with a heightened awareness and is on edge at the start of every discussion.
“I definitely think about it more now,” he said of the altercations on Saturday. “I don’t know what someone is capable of. It doesn’t even have to be an argument. It just has to be someone louder than anyone should be.
He, like many, remains baffled as to why a bump or a misunderstanding has to seemingly result in shouting.
“Just little things that shouldn’t matter,” he said. “Simple things that can be solved with a ‘sorry’ or ‘excuse me.’”
1:24
On the A train Thursday, the two men — well beyond “excuse me” — spun each other around a pole before throwing a few sloppy punches and falling onto an empty bench. But then a young woman, perhaps an associate of the man who had been taunted, darted out of the crowd and appeared to slash the screaming man in the back with a knife.
“You stabbed me?” he asked her with genuine surprise. He reached to his back and felt under an increasingly red stain on his shirt.
A bystander wearing a safety vest intervened. He calmly separated the men, who seemed to obey. The fight might have ended there.
Then the bleeding man stood up, took off his jacket and threw it at another bench. It didn’t land softly, but with a heavy thud.
Nobody heard it. Many passengers had shouted during the brief fistfight, “There are babies here!” – and no one paid any attention to what could have been in the coat.
The bleeding man seemed to be deciding his next move. “I’ll lock you up!” he screamed. Then he bent down and pulled a gun from his jacket pocket.
Four shots echoed through the train and station.
Data, fear and resignation
Officials are falling back on figures that suggest you are statistically unlikely to become the victim of a crime on the subway. The number of attacks on a given day is small compared to the number of riders and rides. This appeals to many: This is evident from a recent study by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority found that just over half of travelers thought the metro was safe.
And yet, another video of Thursday surfaced. The photo was taken in a nearby car of the same A train.
Dozens of riders – too many to count on the screen – have fallen to the ground. Some cry. Others peer around and then lower their heads. Someone calls for help. There is no immediate response.
It’s an image that feels more of the moment than any number.
“I don’t want to be in New York,” the woman who shot the video, Sherri Paul, said told FOX News the next day. “I don’t see myself in New York if I have to travel by train or bus. I don’t think it’s safe for me.”
The fear she described was familiar to Mr. Gonzalez, who recently admitted that it has been a year and 11 months since he was shot by Mr. James on a train, the bullet piercing his calf and ending up below his knee. He couldn’t handle the subway for a while.
But now that fear has calcified into resignation.
“They said there would be more people patrolling,” he said, thinking back to 2022. “I think it’s been the same, if not worse. I see people doing things, homeless people having fun. A lot of things that were supposed to be resolved, but that didn’t happen at all.
4:11
The A train finally arrived at a station, Hoyt-Schermerhorn, that pushes passengers in and out of Brooklyn along busy lines. Police stormed the station and sealed it off to investigate what had happened.
The bleeding man was last seen on the video holding a gun and walking toward the other man. But seconds later it was he who was shot in the head, after the other man apparently grabbed his gun, police said. He was hospitalized in critical but stable condition.
As these facts slowly came to light, crowded trains stopped in both directions, leaving passengers clueless as to what was causing the delay.
With another A train nearby, the afternoon commute stopped at the High Street station and stayed there. Five minutes became ten, and then twenty. There were no explanations other than ‘police activity’. The frustration increased.
It always seems to start the same way.
“You’re sitting there, and I’m old enough to be your mother!” a woman was heard screaming. The person she was shouting at said something, and the woman shouted even louder.
Some laughed. Most of them just sat there. The shouting continued until the person being shouted at got up and left the car.
Just another Thursday.