“The Longest Thirty Seconds of My Absolute Life”: A Survivor’s Account of the Brooklyn Subway Shooting

Unlike other New Yorkers these days, Kenneth Foote-Smith felt generally safe on the subway. Last year, at a friend’s urging, the twenty-five-year-old paralegal reluctantly agreed to stop riding the A line, after two homeless people were stabbed to death on the train. Otherwise, Foote-Smith kept riding. He tended to avoid the 1, 2, and 3, mainly because they couldn’t be relied on, but he took the N every day to and from work. In his mind, it stood out from all other subway lines in the city. “This was my favorite,” he told me.

At about eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, Foote-Smith boarded an N train bound for midtown Manhattan from the Fifty-ninth Street station in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Seconds after the doors closed, a man in an adjacent car put on a gas mask, dropped two smoke grenades to the floor, and opened fire with a Glock 9-millimetre handgun. The man who was arrested twenty-four hours after the shooting, sixty-two-year-old Frank R. James, apparently fired thirty-three shots, wounding about two dozen riders around him.

Foote-Smith watched trapped passengers try to flee for their lives and beg for help. “It was the longest thirty seconds of my absolute life,” he said. When the train pulled into the next station, at Thirty-sixth Street, Foote-Smith ran out of the car, surrounded by panicked passengers, some gasping for air and crawling onto a platform tinged with blood. The attacker disappeared into the crowd, leaving a hatchet, fireworks, and three ammunition magazines behind.

Hours after the attack, I spoke with Foote-Smith about what he witnessed, how it changed his view of the city, and which city officials and agencies he felt had failed him and other passengers. The conductor on his train, Foote-Smith said, seemed unprepared. The M.T.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment. His account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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“I woke up a little earlier than I usually do, made breakfast, and read a chapter of the book ‘101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think.’ I like starting my morning like this. Enough to think about on my quick seven-minute walk to the station. It’s my everyday commute for the past three months, since I moved to Bay Ridge-Sunset Park. I leave at seven-fifty every morning so I can get to work at 8:40 to 8:50 A.M., depending on whether the train shows up.

“I got to the station. I got down to the platform, and I was standing at the platform at the front because I like to sit at the very front of the train. I don’t know why—I know it’s statistically not safer. And today, when the train pulled up, it was a little too packed for me. I’m a taller person. I’m, like, six feet two, two hundred and thirty pounds, so I’m kind of a bigger guy. I don’t really like to be shoulder to shoulder. So, I was, like, No big deal—I saw on the sign when I was walking down that the next N train would be here in two minutes. And that was the decision that changed my entire day—to wait for the next train.

“The next train arrives, and I’m, like, Oh, perfect, there’s not that many people. Couldn’t get a seat but I got my next favorite spot, which is standing against the door on the side of the express train that doesn’t open. And so, I was just standing there. I was on my phone reading a Japanese manga. I like to read those on the subway: quick four scenes, next page, and I can read two or three pages in between stops. Real nice and easy to digest.

“I always have these big headphones on. I’d much rather hear my music than the glorious sounds of the subway. It was probably just some positive rap. SoundCloud rap, good beat, makes you feel good while you’re reading a manga.

“We leave Fifty-ninth Street, and, once we got into the part of the tunnel where you kind of lose service for a little bit, that’s when things happened. There was this huge bang, almost sounded like glass shattering. It sounded unnatural. It wasn’t a normal subway noise. And so, that prompted me to take a headphone off. And I kind of, like, scanned toward the conductor’s door, and then, as I was turning back toward the end of the train where the connector door is to get to the other subway car, everyone gets up and shuffles all the way toward me, pretty much all in front of me. And I’m, like, What’s going on?

“Before I can actually turn my head, I hear three big bangs—bang, bang, bang—and it sounded right on top of us, very close, much louder than the first bang. It was a completely different tone and sound. I turn my head, and I see a gentleman banging on the subway door and trying to open it. I’m looking at that man dead in the face at this point, trying to make out, Is he mentally ill? Is he kind of having an episode? He was ferociously trying to open this door, like, with no regard for his body and throwing all his energy into it. It’s reckless to open this door, and I’m, like, Why is he trying so hard? And then I looked behind him. I see this white smoke filling the train car. It’s maybe, like, already halfway up the train car by the time I noticed, but I could still kind of see into the car. What I see is three faces smashed against the glass. And it’s three women’s faces slamming on the door, screaming for help.

“There’s a signal stop right before the train pulls into the next station. And it usually stops for, like, a minute or thirty seconds—longest thirty seconds of my absolute life. All I could do was watch. I could make out the guy’s face and I saw terror. I looked into his eyes and I saw fear. Once I saw the guy banging on the door, I completely took off my headphones and started texting my close friend. I was, like, ‘Something’s up, the train car behind me is smoking.’ But I didn’t really have service.

“I was praying that it was an electrical fire or, like, some maintenance issue on the train. My heart drops, my stomach drops, and I feel panic starting to swell over me. And I kind of look around the train. I look at everyone else’s faces. Some people are recording, and I see that same panic and that worry washing over people. They’re starting to yell for the conductor. You know, ‘Move the train, please!’ And then we hear the three, four—bop, bop, bop, bops—real quick, back to back. We all knew what it was but no one wanted to say anything. We were just screaming for the conductor to move the train. The screams are getting louder. The man was banging on the door harder. I couldn’t see into the car anymore because it was now completely filled with smoke at that point.

“The women who were originally against the door opened it, and now people were kind of spilling out onto the small platform between the subway cars and screaming. Now we can hear the screams. It’s much more audible. And it kind of reminded me of a scene in the zombie movie with all the—just the desperation, and the kind of reckless abandonment, trying to push through something or, like, push through a locked door or broken door. It felt like a horror movie. And we were frozen on our train. No one did anything until after they opened the door between the cars, and then a gentleman bigger than me, a large male, God bless him, brave as hell, comes and tries to open the door from our side. I wasn’t going to be the person who tried to do that because I didn’t know who this man was on the other side of the door. Because in my head I said that he could have been the shooter. The man tries to open the door, uses all of his strength, but the door does not budge at all. So, finally, right after he tries the door, the train moves. As the train is pulling into the station, we hear the bop-bop-bops, three more again, real quick, three or four more. And, at this point, we’re all huddled against the doors to get out.

“That’s when it becomes an absolute maelstrom. As soon as the doors opened, people flooded out the gates, like a race. They were coughing, covering their faces, crying, absolute hysteria, physically shaking. I saw people who were shot limp out and just kind of lie on the ground. The scariest part was that we didn’t know what the shooter looked like because, as people were running off the train, they were screaming, ‘He’s got a gun,’ ‘He’s got a bomb,’ ‘He’s shooting,’ ‘Everyone, get down,’ ‘He’s got gas masks,’ ‘He’s an M.T.A. guy.’ People were saying so many things. And I didn’t know really what to do. There was a pillar toward the end of the platform, and I was right behind it, sticking half my body out, trying to assess what was really going on, and making sense of it. Right as the N train stopped, the R on the opposite side of the platform pulled up.