The 1, 2, 3, and 9 trains ground to a halt yesterday for eight hours as a robbery turned into a police chase into the subway tunnels, ending in the shooting of the robbery suspect. A 66 year-old man with a bloody head approached police yesterday at 11:45AM, emerging from the A/C/E stop at Church and Chambers in Tribeca, who said he had just been robbed and beaten, perhaps by a gun (the Post reports that the robbery was captured on surveillance cameras). The police chased the suspect along Chambers; the suspect went down the 1/2/3/9 stop at West Broadway and Chambers, jumping in front of a 3 train that had just arrived in the station. Police followed him (at least one officer did) into the tunnel, and the suspect reportedly yelled, "Shoot me! Shoot me!" One of the officers shot him in the chest, and the middle-aged suspect later died at NYU Downtown Hospital. The suspect was unarmed, but one witness says it seems like the supsect was holding something, though "It was too fast." The suspect was referred to as a "mole man," someone who lives in the subway tunnels. And there really are people who live in the subway tunnels.
One 3 train passenger told the Times that after the shooting, the MTA told passenger to leave the station: "It was not very smart of us to be on a train during a shootout." Gothamist was heading downtown in the early afternoon, when the PA system said that there would be no 1/2/3/9 service "due to an investigation at Chambers Street" and then we wondered if it was a real investigation. Little did we know.
