NEW YORK (AP) — A man was shoved onto subway tracks ahead of an oncoming train and critically injured Tuesday afternoon, police said, adding to a series of violent encounters in the nation’s busiest subway system this holiday season.
The 45-year-old man was taken to a hospital in critical condition, and police said they took a person of interest into custody shortly after they arrived around 1:30 p.m. Authorities did not release the names of that person or the man who was injured.
The incident happened at a station under Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, a little more than a mile (about 1.6 kilometers) from Tuesday night’s big New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square.
The possibility of being pushed onto the tracks is a long-running nightmare for many New Yorkers. While it occurs rarely compared to the millions of rides each day, a push just this past March killed a person in East Harlem.
Such attacks have happened elsewhere as well: A woman died after being shoved into a San Francisco commuter train this summer.
In New York, personal safety in the subway is generally comparable to safety in the city as a whole. But life-threatening crimes such as stabbings and shoves spread alarm about the trains, which carried more than 1 billion riders in 2024.
Police figures show major crimes on subways were down through November compared with the same period last year, but killings rose from five to nine.
That was before a woman — identified Tuesday as Debrina Kawam, 57 — was set ablaze while asleep on a train in Brooklyn on Dec. 22. She died, and a man has been charged with murder and arson in her death.
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Two days later a man slashed two people with a knife in Manhattan’s Grand Central subway station on Christmas Eve, police said. The victims survived their wrist and neck wounds, and the man was arrested on assault and other charges, authorities said.
“Crime is not surging in the subway system,” Mayor Eric Adams said at a wide-ranging news conference Tuesday morning, before the shove at the 18th Street station on the No. 1 subway line. “You know, we have some high profile incidents, and we’re really disturbed about it.”
But he said subway crime overall is low.