By Jonathan Allen and Brad Brooks
NEW YORK CITY (Reuters) -New York City police said on Monday six people had been shot at a subway station in the Bronx, with one person dead and another five wounded.
A spokeswoman for the New York Police Department said by phone that no arrests had been made in the shooting and that it was not clear what condition the five injured people were in. Local media, citing unnamed police sources, reported the five sustained non-life threatening injuries.
The most recent data shows crime remains rare on New York’s subway system: about 3.8 million 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, in May 2022, 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.
Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat and a former city police captain, has sought to reassure unnerved commuters by increasing the number of police officers in subway stations.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York and Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; Editing by Lincoln Feast)