A brazen weekend murder in a Midtown subway station crowded with tourists helped nearly double the number of mass transit killings in the Big Apple so far this year compared to the same period in 2025.
Police said Saturday’s fatal midday shooting at the Seventh Avenue and 53rd Street station in Manhattan marked the seventh murder on the city’s subway and bus since January – with the gunman, described as armed and dangerous, still at large.
There were four murders in transit during the same period last year.
“The subway was what was cool about New York,” Gisela Medone, 44, a tourist from Miami who is in town with her mother and sister and staying at the Sheridan New York Hotel near the train station, said Sunday.
“Part of the New York experience is taking the subway, and we’ve been looking forward to it. Now we’re going to have to take Uber everywhere.”
The siblings’ mother, Gracielo Medone, in town with the family to celebrate the 41st birthday of her other daughter, Yamila, said the shooting put a damper on the trip – and promises to put a dent in their wallet.
“We’re going to walk,” the 64-year-old mother said. “If we can’t walk, we’ll take cars. But everywhere, for five days, it wasn’t in the budget.
“I don’t know how we’re going to afford it. Now there’s a place or a meal we can’t get, or we’ll buy fewer souvenirs. The taxi ride from the airport tried to steal $145 from us. He said $75, then when we got here he said $145.”
The shootings at the 53rd Street station, which was filled with tourists at the time, indicate that transit violence runs counter to the historic citywide decline in major crime in the five boroughs.
A man named Merrill, a 44-year-old private security guard from the Bronx, hopped on a train at the station Sunday, shrugging his shoulders: “I don’t see anything new.”
He said the crimes “resemble gang violence and stabbings are usually acts of homeless people.”
Chalrton D’Souza, founder and president of the grassroots group Passengers United, said the train station where Saturday’s shooting took place had long been plagued with problems.
“There is open drug use at this station,” he told the Post. “There are people injecting themselves with hypodermic needles. There’s a lot of gang activity in the station, a lot of people selling drugs here.
“Where is Governor Kathy Hochul? D’Souza said. “Where is our mayor? He didn’t even make a statement yesterday about this.”
Police said the shooting happened around 12:20 p.m. Saturday, when the victim and the shooter allegedly argued on the platform.
The shooter hit the victim in the chest and fled the scene as the strap-on wearers rushed for their lives.
The killer, captured on surveillance footage wearing a red hoodie, red pants, black vest and carrying a dark-colored backpack, remains at large and has been called armed and dangerous by cops.
The victim was rushed to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Sources insisted to the Post that there was “nothing random between these two individuals,” although further details were not disclosed.
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