MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

New York Subway shooting leaves many injured; assailant at large

The suspect was a black male with a heavy build, Sewell said.

At least 17 people were injured after an unidentified gunman opened fire in the New York subway Tuesday morning, in what appears to have been the doings of a “lone wolf,” according to local media reports. The perpetrator was not arrested in the next few hours following the incident.

New York City police are reportedly looking for a suspect who was wearing a green construction-type vest, a hooded sweatshirt, and a gas mask when he set off a smoke bomb on a subway train and started shooting people to then drive away from the Brooklyn station in a U-Haul truck with Arizona license plates. Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell has described the suspect as a black male with a heavy build.

Some 16 people were injured aboard at 36th Street and Fourth Avenue station. People both on the train and on the station platform, which serves the D, N, and R lines that pass through the Sunset Park neighborhood, were shot.

“This person is dangerous. We're asking individuals to be very vigilant and alert,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a briefing Tuesday afternoon. “No more mass shootings. No more disrupting lives. No more creating heartbreak for people who are trying to live their lives as normal New Yorkers,” she added. “It has to end and it ends now.

A senior law enforcement official told The New York Times that the search for the gunman was made more difficult by the fact that none of the security cameras inside the subway station were operational at the time of the shooting.

”This is not being investigated as an act of terrorism at the present time,” Sewell also explained.

According to WABC-TV, at least one person was also shot at a different subway station in Greenwood Heights.

Five people were in critical condition but expected to survive. At least 17 in all were injured in some way in the attack that began on a subway train that pulled into the 36th Street station in the borough’s Sunset Park neighborhood.