Manhunt continues for Brooklyn subway attacker who shot 10 people

#1:Manhunt continues for Brooklyn subway attacker who shot 10 people

 

 Authorities on Wednesday continued searching for the attacker who they said shot 10 people on a subway train in Brooklyn a day earlier, setting off panic and a sprawling investigation.

Police on Wednesday morning said that a man sought in the investigation was now considered a suspect, after they had previously called him a person of interest in the case.

According to law enforcement officials, an attacker donned a gas mask and then flooded a subway car in Brooklyn with smoke before opening fire on Tuesday morning, striking 10 people. Five of them were left in critical but stable condition, officials said, and none of the wounds were believed to be life-threatening.

But the shooting aboard a subway car at the height of the morning commute set off panic in New York, which has already been grappling with a rise in gun violence in recent years.

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During a briefing on Tuesday evening, police said Frank R. James, 62, was considered a person of interest in the subway attack, but they were careful not to call him a suspect.

A New York police spokeswoman said that status had shifted Wednesday morning, and he was now a suspect, though she did not elaborate on what led to the change. During a Wednesday morning appearance on WNYC, Mayor Eric Adams (D) said the shift was due to “new information that has become available to the team.”

As the manhunt continued into a second day, significant questions still remained, including what could have motivated the attack, which transformed an ordinary morning commute into panicked mayhem.

When police responded to the shooting scene, they found nearly three dozen spent shell casings, a pair of used smoke grenades, two undetonated smoke grenades and a hatchet. But the attacker, they said, was gone.

They also found a key for a U-Haul van, which was later recovered in Brooklyn, police said. That U-Haul, they said, connected police with James, who they said had rented the van in Philadelphia.

James W. Essig, chief of detectives for the New York police, had described the man as a person of interest Tuesday evening but was cautious in describing his possible tie to the attack.

“We are endeavoring to locate him to determine his connection to the subway shooting, if any,” Essig said.

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Investigators were confident James was at the scene of the shooting, based on the discovery of his credit card and the van he rented, according to an official familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the ongoing investigation.

But because his height did not seem to match the description offered by some witnesses, the official said on Tuesday evening, authorities did not feel confident identifying James as the suspected shooter.

The Washington Post has been unable to immediately reach James or family members.

Police said James had addresses in Wisconsin and Philadelphia, and they later added that he also had unspecified ties to New York City, New Jersey and Ohio.

In Philadelphia, a woman who spoke on the condition of anonymity said she recognized James when his face was shown on television.

The woman said she had lived on her block for five decades, and over that span, James had lived nearby periodically. It’s an area where “everybody knows everybody,” she said, but James’s family kept to themselves. The woman also said she did not believe he had lived in the area for some time.

The Philadelphia police were assisting “out of state authorities in any way we can concerning this individual," a spokesman for that department said in an email Wednesday. The spokesman did not respond to an inquiry about whether the department had any prior records of interactions with James, referring a reporter instead to the New York police and FBI.

The search for James involved both local and federal law enforcement officials. Drew Wade, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, wrote in an email Wednesday that it had joined the search. Wade said about 50 New York police detectives work on a New York-New Jersey regional task force and “will assist deputy US Marshals in the search for the person of interest.”

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