Investigators are still searching for any surveillance video of the man who fatally stabbed two men and injured another on the No. 2 train Sunday morning, but they have finally released a description of the suspect, along with a police sketch. According to the NYPD, the suspect is an Hispanic male approximately 25-years-old, standing between 5'10" - 6'0" tall with a medium build. WPIX reports that he was last seen wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans and a black leather waist length jacket.
The violence broke out around 5 a.m. as a group of ten friends were riding to Brooklyn after partying at a Bryant Park club. One of the men tried to toss a bag of beer bottles out of the train as it stopped at the 14th Street Station, but instead, the garbage hit an unidentified man boarding the train with his friends. The assailant took it personally and quickly flew into a homicidal rage. Darnell Morel of Newark and his friend Ricardo Williams were stabbed to death, and the perp is believed to have fled at the Christopher Street station, which does not have surveillance cameras.
In the aftermath of the stabbing and the Moscow subway bombing, the MTA has announced that 900 new surveillance cameras are on their way, and should be installed throughout the system by June. (There are 4,313 security cameras throughout the system, but more than 2,000 of them are inoperable.) The new cameras will be focused on the turnstiles, and are expected to bring the number of functional surveillance cameras to approximately 3,000. In the meantime, New Yorkers like Cynthia Jones are freaked; she tells the Daily News, "I'm going to carry a bat."
Even Mayor Bloomberg is troubled about Big Brother's absence, telling reporters yesterday, "It concerns me a great deal. A lot of those cameras don't work, and someday maybe we're going to get very badly hurt because of it." Sure, you can scoff at the Mayor's choice of words ("someday," or "we") but he rides his Chevy Suburban motorcade to the subway with his entourage just like everybody else!
