Murders across the city’s subway system have surged 60% so far this year — a troubling trend as overall crime on the rails has dipped.
Eight people have been slaughtered on subway cars or in stations as of Sept. 8, up from just five during the same period last year, according to NYPD data.
The spike in killings is approaching the 25-year high set in 2022, with 10 murders.
From 1997 to 2020, there were never more than five murders in the subway in a single year, according to the earliest public NYPD data.
“It’s not a safe environment to be waiting for the train,” said Jakeba Dockery, 42, whose husband, Richard Henderson, was fatally gunned down in January on a 3 train in Brooklyn, after he tried to break up a fight between straphangers over loud music.
“It just feels evil,” she told The Post.
The latest violent subway death came Sept. 5, a little after 11 p.m., when a gunman blasted grocer Freddie Weston, 47, near the MetroCard booth at the Rockaway Avenue station in Brooklyn, according to police and his family.
Had there been cameras near the station’s ticketing area, Weston, 47, who was heading to work in College Point, might still be alive, his sister Tina told The Post.
“They took the opportunity because there wasn’t [any] camera,” she said, her voice cracking.
The jump in murders persists despite a slew of high-profile initiatives that have helped tamp down an early-year surge in crime underground. Heavily-trafficked stations were flooded with 750 National Guardsman, while an additional 1,000 NYPD officers were deployed to monitor the subway system.
Total subway crime has decreased nearly 6% this year compared with the same period in 2023, with robberies down about 18% and felony assaults dropping nearly 5%, according to an NYPD spokesperson.
“This overall crime reduction is due in large part to thorough investigations by detectives into every major crime within the subway, and the proactive work of officers deployed in the transit system,” the spokesperson said. “This year alone, those very officers removed 43 guns (compared to 28 last year) and 1,536 knives (compared to 1,004 last year) from the subway system, the highest weapons seizure rates in the last decade.”
Violent crime remains well above pre-pandemic levels, however, and straphangers continue to sweat whether their next ride will be on the Murder Express.
“You don’t know if you’re going to make it home,” retiree Vickie Reeves, 68, bemoaned while making a rare subway trip at the Times Square station.
“There’s a lot of mental illness and it’s painful to your heart that you don’t know who you come in contact with, if they’re going to push you in front of the train.”
Joseph Giacalone, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, attributed the persistence in murders to a combination of “worn out” police force, as well as a brain-drain of veteran transit officers due to cops resigning or retiring.
“You can’t have just anyone patrol the subway — it’s a different animal,” he said.
Dockery and her daughter will no longer use the subway, she said.
Nowadays, she drives a 2025 Lexus NX 350 to shuttle herself around the city for errands and to bring her teenager to and from her high school basketball games.
“I don’t do the MTA,” she said. “Between the anger [of violent straphangers], the mentally ill, I can’t.”
