It always seems to start the same way.
I’m going to beat you !
A confrontation between strangers on a subway escalates into hostility before anyone knows who is yelling at whom, or why.
Come on man! Do something !
A moment so familiar that other passengers don’t even bother to look up from their phones or pause their conversations.
I will beat you – only you. Just you.
But a brawl Thursday on a speeding A train in Brooklyn that started with that taunting didn’t end there. The escalation continued in front of a rush-hour crowd, moving from words to fists to a blade and, finally, a gun.
The meeting came a little more than a week after New York’s governor took the extraordinary step of ordering the National Guard underground to make trains safer. The shooting undermined the city’s message that taking the subway is, statistically speaking, quite safe.
The episode fueled a sense of futility about a system that seems to capture all of the city’s problems from above — mental health crises, illegal guns — and lock them in crowded steel tubes.
For those who will ride the A train on Thursday, some with young children at their side, no city statistics are likely to provide comfort. Send the police, send the guard – many have come to believe that the subway will be the subway anyway.
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 a crazy event that happened one day on an A train.
It feels more like a clear representation of the state of the city, a sense of metropolitan anxiety that has been felt, described, and discussed from Flatbush to Fordham and back. A small, broken piece of a place that made its way underground, for all to see.
0:01
The video begins after the start of the meeting. Something caused a passenger, a man dressed in dark clothing and wearing a cap, to flee. He relentlessly throws taunt after taunt at a silent man who sits. Sometimes he leans over the man, screaming.
The train runs continuously on an express track with significant gaps between stations. No one seems to mind a level of hostility that could never escalate in other forms of transportation – on an airplane, for example, a similarly cramped environment ripe for frustrated passengers. In a subway, the threatening screams could simply be called: Thursday.
The woman recording the video makes this point in her own way, stopping to point the camera at her own blank face, unimpressed: Here we go again.
Finally, the seated man, seemingly finished taking the abuse, stands up and crouches into a fighting stance. The screaming man seems pleased with the challenge and stands up. Only then do a dozen nearby passengers collectively decide it’s time to move backwards, pushing toward the opposite end of the car.
“Little things that shouldn’t matter”
Aroldo Gonzalez, 20, knows this moment too well. The panic, stronger than the questions: why? What is going on? – and the need to escape.
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 others, and was convicted and sentenced to 10 life terms.
Mr. Gonzalez now travels on trains with a heightened awareness, bristling at the start of any argument.
“I’m definitely thinking about it more now,” he said Saturday of the altercations. “I don’t know what anyone is capable of. It doesn’t even have to be an argument. All it takes is for someone to be louder than someone should be.
He remains perplexed, like many, as to why a bump or misunderstanding must seemingly turn into shouting.
“Just little things that shouldn’t matter,” he said. “Simple things that could be resolved with a “sorry” or an “excuse me.”
1:24
On the A train on Thursday, the two men – way beyond “excuse me” – spun around a pole before throwing a few sloppy punches at each other and tumbling onto an empty bench. But then a young woman, perhaps a companion of the man who had been taunted, rushed out of the crowd and appeared to strike the screaming man in the back with a blade.
“Did you stab me?” he asked her with genuine surprise. He reached to his back to feel under a growing red stain on his shirt.
A passerby wearing a safety vest intervened. He calmly separated the men, who seemed to obey. The fight could have ended there.
Then the bloodied man stood up, took off his jacket and threw it onto another bench. It didn’t land softly, but with a thud.
Nobody heard. Many passengers had shouted during the brief scuffle: «There are babies here!» – and no one paid any attention to what might have been in the jacket.
The bloodied man seemed to be deciding his next move. “I’ll lock you up!” He shouted. Then he leaned down and took a pistol from his jacket pocket.
Moments later, four shots rang out on the train and in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station.
Data, fear and resignation
Authorities rely on figures suggesting that it is statistically unlikely to find yourself the victim of a crime on the subway. The number of assaults on a given day is tiny compared to the number of riders and rides. This resonates with many: A recent survey by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority found that just over half of riders felt the subway was safe.
And yet another video from Thursday surfaced. She was caught in a nearby car on the same A train.
Dozens of runners – too many to count on the screen – fell to the ground. Some cry. Others glance around then lower their heads again. Someone is screaming for help. There is no immediate answer.
It’s an image that feels more current than any number.
“I don’t want to be in New York,” the woman who filmed the video, Sherri Paul, told FOX News the next day. “I don’t see myself in New York if I have to take the train or the bus. I don’t think it’s safe for me.
The fear she described was familiar to Mr. Gonzalez, who recently acknowledged that it had been a year and 11 months since Mr. James shot him on the train, the bullet piercing his calf and lodging under his knee. He couldn’t face the subway for a while.
But now that fear has turned into resignation.
“They said there would be more people patrolling,” he said, looking back to 2022. “I think it’s the same, if not worse.” I see people doing things, homeless people acting. A bunch of things that were supposed to be fixed but weren’t fixed at all.
4:11
The doors to the A train had finally opened at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, which transports passengers in and out of Brooklyn along busy lines. Police stormed the station and shut it down to investigate what happened.
The bleeding man was last seen on the video holding a gun and walking toward the other man. But seconds later, he was the one 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 emerged, crowded trains stopped in both directions, with passengers having no idea what was causing the delay.
On another nearby A train, the afternoon journey stopped at High Street station and stayed there. Five minutes became 10, then 20. No explanation was provided beyond “police activity.” The frustration mounted.
It always seems to start the same way.
“You’re sitting here and I’m old enough to be your mother!” a woman could be heard screaming. Whoever she was yelling at said something, and the woman screamed even louder.
Some laughed. Most just sat there. The yelling continued, until the person who was being yelled at got up and left the car.
Just another Thursday.