An arrest in the New York subway attack brings relief but leaves unanswered questions

After 29 hours in which the police combed the streets, scoured surveillance cameras, patrolled subway platforms and sent an alert to phones across New York seeking tips, the man accused of opening fire on a subway train in Brooklyn and injuring at least 23 people was arrested near a McDonald’s in the East Village on Wednesday, officials said.
The suspect, Frank R. James, 62, was taken into custody without a struggle about 5 miles from the station where he is accused of committing one of the worst attacks on New York’s subway system.
“My fellow New Yorkers: We got him,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a news conference Wednesday afternoon. “We got him.”

Federal officials charged James with carrying out a terror attack on a mass transit system, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Brooklyn. If convicted, he could face life in prison. He is expected to appear in court Thursday.
It was unclear who alerted the police that James was at the McDonald’s on 1st Avenue shortly before he was arrested around 1.40 pm.
There were scores of calls to authorities, and an array of people took credit for turning him in. A number of law enforcement officials also said James himself may have called the tip line. Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell said that detectives were investigating who provided the information about the McDonald’s.

James’ arrest brought some relief to residents worried about an accused gunman at large on the transit system, and to officials who feared that another high-profile violent act on the subway would diminish confidence in the city at a precarious moment in its recovery from the pandemic.
“Everybody’s on edge because of what happened yesterday, obviously,” said Lee Lloyd, who was inside the bar he owns in the East Village when officers surrounded James and took him into custody. “When we saw five cop cars come through, I was like, ‘Oh, man, what now?’ ”
But even as the widespread manhunt for James, which involved multiple federal and state agencies and hundreds of officers, came to a close, the investigation left many questions unanswered. Police officials and prosecutors have not yet provided a motive for the shooting, which left 10 people wounded gunfire and at least 13 others with related injuries.
This photo provided Will B Wylde, a person is aided outside a subway car in the Brooklyn borough of New York, April 12, 2022.(AP/PTI)
The shooting victims ranged from a 15-year-old boy to men and women in their 40s. At least nine people remained hospitalised Wednesday, but all of them were in stable condition with no life-threatening injuries. A number of those injured in the attack were teenagers or college students who were on a normally mundane trek — heading to school on the train.
Rudy Pérez, 20, was struck in the left leg and had to be helped off the train another passenger, he said. Doctors told him it will be about a month until he can walk again. Until then, Pérez, who works in construction, is unsure how he will be able to do his job and is worried about his safety.
“I’m afraid it’ll happen again,” he said, adding, “I’m worried about everyone else.”
Authorities have not fully accounted for James’ whereabouts after the shooting. And with the attack provoking questions about ongoing efforts to make the subways safer, transit officials Wednesday acknowledged that a surveillance camera at the station where the attack took place was not working properly.
Emergency personnel work at the scene of a shooting at a subway station in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, April 12, 2022. (Reuters)
Maintenance workers inspected the camera at the station Sunday, transit officials said, two days before the shooting, and traced the problem to a fiber-optic cable connection failure that also interrupted feeds from cameras in two other stations: the local stop immediately before the scene of the shooting and the one immediately after it.
Adams on Tuesday said the issue had initially slowed the police’s efforts to identify and locate the gunman.
Though James was initially described as a person of interest whom the police wanted to question, the police said he was considered the lone gunman early Wednesday as their investigation progressed.
“We were able to shrink his world quickly,” Sewell said. “There was nowhere left for him to run.”
Frank James, a person of interest in the shooting that took place on the N train in Brooklyn, New York is shown in this handout photo provided the New York City Police Department (NYPD) April 12, 2022. (New York City Police Department (NYPD)/Handout via Reuters)
The police have accused James of putting on a gas mask on an N train, then releasing two smoke grenades and firing a Glock 9 mm handgun at passengers as the train pulled into the 36th Street station in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighbourhood.
James, who has addresses in Wisconsin and Philadelphia, first came to the police’s attention after investigators at the crime scene found an array of belongings on the train that included the gun, a credit card with James’ name on it and a key to a U-Haul van he was later found to have rented, officials said.
James Essig, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, said that investigators could see James on video entering the Kings Highway station on the N line, eight stops away from the site of the shooting. The U-Haul vehicle he rented was found three blocks away from that station, Essig said.
The video shows James in an orange reflective jacket and yellow construction hat, carrying a bag that was later found at the crime scene, said an official close to the investigation who was not authorised to discuss it publicly. In the video, James swipes a MetroCard and struggles to pass through the turnstiles. He then gets the attention of a station agent and enters the station through a gate.
A photo of the van that police say is connected with the shooting at a subway station as law enforcement officers conduct an investigation in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, April 12, 2022. (Reuters)
Federal officials say surveillance footage later showed James exiting the subway system at the 25th Street station, one stop away from the shooting scene, according to the criminal complaint.
Essig said detectives believed James boarded an R train across the platform from the N train at the 36th Street station, as did some of the shooting victims and many panicked riders. He then rode one stop and headed outside.
James was next spotted entering the 7th Avenue subway stop in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighbourhood, more than a mile away, at around 9:15 a.m. Tuesday, Essig said. At the time, detectives were just beginning their attempts to track him down.
It is not yet clear where he travelled next, and Essig said that detectives were continuing to review video footage. “We’re going to backtrack that,” he said. “That will take literally weeks.”
New York City Transit workers arrive at subway stop in the Brooklyn borough of New York, April 12, 2022. (New York Times)
As they hunted for information, the police used an emergency alert — typically used for weather-related warnings or to find abducted children — to point people across the city toward pictures of James and urged those with information to call a phone number with tips.
With authorities pressing to track down the gunman, the uncertainty around James’ location left some commuters on the city’s bustling subway system Wednesday on edge. Many riders said they were determined to go on with their normal routines, but some admitted to heightened feelings of unease as they rode the trains.
Marco Meza, 38, a building painter, said he lives near the site of the shooting. At the busy Atlantic-Barclays station Wednesday, he said he was still in shock, and that he was struggling to overcome feelings that he should avoid the subway. But he has no choice.
“I have to do it,” Meza said. “I have to wake up every morning and do my things.”
A police officer checks Manhattan subways after a shooting at a subway station in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, April 12, 2022. (Reuters)
The subway is the backbone of New York and officials are intently focused on allaying concerns over its safety as they try to restore ridership that cratered at the onset of the pandemic.
In the aftermath of the shooting, officials, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, Sewell and Janno Lieber, the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, posted photos or videos on social media showing them on public transit. They and Adams, who is isolating after testing positive for Covid, urged riders to return.
“The subway has a special place in New York’s heart,” Lieber said on MSNBC. “We’re never going to let it be taken over maniacs.”
While ridership data for Wednesday was not yet available, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said that ridership Tuesday, the day of the attack, was down about 312,000 people from one week earlier, to about 3.05 million riders.
On many busy platforms, hurried riders said the Brooklyn shootings had already become a dant memory, or that their concerns had receded because of their need to make a living.

Thank you to our MTA workers who always keep New Yorkers moving. pic.twitter.com/8YUoC6EPWz
— Governor Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) April 12, 2022
When Louie Dacunha, 30, was asked about the shooting, his reaction was, “Oh yeah, that happened.”
“I wasn’t even thinking about that,” he said. “I was just thinking, ‘I got to go where I got to go.’ ”
As James was taken into custody more details emerged about a life that included numerous arrests.
He was born in New York City in 1959, according to public records, and his ser, Catherine James Robinson said that he moved frequently between cities.
Police officials said that he was arrested nine times in New York between 1992-98, on a number of charges including possession of burglary tools, a criminal sex act and criminal tampering. He was arrested three times in New Jersey, the first in 1991, the most recent in 2007.
In filling out a portrait of James, detectives have focused on dozens of videos they say he posted on YouTube in which he delivered bigoted rants tied to current events.

In some, he commented on New York’s subway, criticising Adams’ policies to address homelessness on public transit as ineffective and speculating that the mayor could not possibly stop all crime in the system. In others, he mused about violent acts and alluded vaguely to the possibility of committing them.
Inside the jacket James discarded on the subway platform at 36th Street, investigators found a receipt from a storage facility in Philadelphia, where he rented an apartment for about two weeks starting at the end of March, according to the federal criminal complaint.
When they searched the storage unit and his apartment on Tuesday and Wednesday, they found handgun ammunition, a Taser, a high-capacity rifle magazine and a smoke caner, the criminal complaint said.