And you thought the tariff and market news was bad.
It’s been a wild week for international trade policy and the markets, and things have frankly gotten pretty grim around here at NR. I, for one, am tired of all the negativity, and I think we can all agree that America deserves a break from the bleak and insane news dominating the headlines these days. So let’s instead briefly turn our attention to a fun human-interest story guaranteed to lighten your spirits on a Friday: A subway necrophiliac is on the loose in New York City.
Yes, you read that right — truly another Big Apple tale of freakish crime, akin to “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” or “Future HHS Secretary Dumps Bear Corpse in Central Park.” In a New York Times headline to remember, the Gray Lady announced this morning that “Police Seek Man Who They Say Violated a Corpse on an R Train.” (The hyperlink — “nyc-subway-corpse-sex.html” bluntly clarifies any doubts you may harbor as to the nature of the offense.) I’ll let that august journalistic institution take the wheel here for a moment, if only to spare me the indignity:
The police were searching on Thursday for a man investigators believed violated a dead man Wednesday night on a train in a Manhattan subway station, according to an internal police document.
The person who died boarded an R train at around 8 p.m., according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter and the internal document. It was unclear on Thursday when or how the person died.
A man entered the same train car at around 11 p.m. at the Whitehall Street-South Ferry station in the Financial District, according to the official.
Within 45 minutes, the man saw the dead man and began to rummage through his pockets, the official said. The man then began to have sex with the body, according to the official and the document.
I don’t think I can summarize it any better than that myself. (I know that that I don’t want to try.) Understand the several unfolding steps of madness involved in this story. First, a man died on a city train and went undiscovered for quite some time. This is in fact actually the least difficult part of the story to believe; homeless people sleep on trains all the time in both NYC and here in Chicago, and when sharing a car with someone like that most people pointedly keep their distance.
Then, of course, we have the opportunist thief attempting to pickpocket the dead man. This is a sordid detail of petty urban crime at its bleakest, yes, but it’s nothing any long-term urbanite hasn’t seen before.
No, it’s only when that thief takes a sudden paraphiliac turn that this becomes a true “New York horror story,” an emblematic example of what can go spectacularly wrong for you (or your mortal remains) down in the subway at midnight. Aside from the obscenity of the act itself, I am even more horrified at the idea of a man feeling confident enough to take his time to do such a thing on an empty subway car. It is unique (near as I can tell) in the annals of public transit. But realize that the most insane aspect of this story is not the corpse-abuse, but the fact that this man got away and is still on the loose. He doesn’t seem likely to repeat the offense anytime soon, mind you, but this is the present state of security in the subway even moderately late at night.
The Times sub-headlined its news piece with truly remarkable framing: “New York’s subways have been the subject of debate, with politicians using them to paint the city as out of control and dangerous to residents and visitors.” Yeah, can’t imagine why. I can do no better than Liz Wolfe of Reason when she points out that “the subhed appears to be, uh, pretty backed up by the headline.”
Look, on any objective level this is a horrifying story. But I am determined to find the bright side of a story involving a thief sodomizing a corpse on the R train, because it is Friday, people, and we need good cheer on Friday. So . . . well, it at least beats the story of the poor woman who was immolated by an illegal immigrant psychopath while asleep on a different New York City train late last December. Yes, people died in both situations, but at least nobody was technically murdered this time. In Eric Adams’s New York, we must regard this as an improvement.