As the day ends, I feel worse than I did in the morning when I first watched a Fox5 local news report of the subway shooting in Brooklyn.
At 8:24 a.m. a man wearing an orange construction vest and hardhat opened fire inside an N train rolling into the 36th Street station.
A person of interest was cited on the police briefing this evening.
As a lifelong city girl who was born in Brooklyn and lives there today, I won’t take the subway unless I’m forced to when there’s no other option.
What happened and where it happened is curious to me.
The 36th Street station on Fourth Avenue is in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
A neighborhood of immigrants on low incomes. Abogados and Mercados and Taquerias line Fifth Avenue from Fortieth Street to Sixtieth Street.
Curious to me it is why a gunman would shoot subway riders passing through a low-income neighborhood.
The crime was most likely planned down to each specific detail and every specific minute.
A key to a U-Haul truck was found at the crime scene. The gunman was thought to have boarded the train at the Kings Highway stop.
It’s one thing to drive a U-Haul truck to New York City and board a train right after.
I think the gunman must have had an accomplice parked in a van outside the 36th Street subway entrance.
How else could the shooter have escaped and not been caught yet?
A 9mm Glock was found at the crime scene. It had been fired 33 times.
We cannot engage in “guilt-by-association” of individuals that look like the person of interest shown on the news.
What’s the most terrible thing is that citizens will turn out to vote for Republicans they believe will crack down on crime.
In New York City a lot of us think bail reform has allowed people who commit minor crimes to remain loose on the street to commit bigger crimes.
What is the root cause of the violent crime that occurs in neighborhoods like East New York in Brooklyn?
The disintegration of families is thought to be a contributing factor to the unravelling of communities.
Living in poverty can’t be a shiny happy experience for young people either.
The person of interest in this shooting is 62 years old and not from here.
Today’s subway attack was the exception to the rule.
If you’re a tourist and have the cash to be able to vacation here, most likely you can afford to take a cab around this town.
I wouldn’t advise taking the subway if you can help it.
One night I was taking the train home. A stranger across from me (he was a strange man likely) started giving advice to two women sitting near him that he didn’t know.
Then there’s the drunks. And the flashers. The guy in a gray flannel coat lying on a seat like he’s sleeping in bed.
The panhandlers. A trio of Mariachi singers crooning for coins. A quartet of beggars belting out “Under the Boardwalk” in the summer.
The cold calculated attention-to-detail of the subway shooter today is what creeps me out.
This was no symptomatic person with a mental illness pushing a woman onto the subway tracks.
My goal when I retire from my job is to take cabs everywhere.
One thing isn’t talked about. I’ll be the only one talking about this now. Just like I’ve been the only one talking about other things.
If you ask me inequality comes down to geography. Geography often determines your biography.
On Staten Island where I used to live all the housing projects were located out of view and miles away from retail stores. Geographic isolation can’t be a good thing.
In 1987 in college, I took an Economic Geography course. My 18-page term paper talked about the effect of sanctions on apartheid in South Africa.
The fact that today’s gunman carefully planned and executed a shooting exactly where he carried it out says something.
Continuing to toss teenagers who commit low-level crimes into Rikers is not the Republican solution we need to halt this crime wave.
If your only role model is a Blood or Crip that doesn’t bode well for your future prospects.
I’ll end here with this: it’s not the crime itself that is the problem. It’s the societal ills that cause the crime that need to be rectified.
Left of the Dial 