Woman pushed to her death in front of New York subway train

The man believed responsible for the incident on Saturday morning fled the scene but turned himself in to transit police a short time later, the police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, said at a news conference with the mayor, Eric Adams, at the station.

The 40-year-old victim, a New York resident, was waiting for a southbound R train around 9.40am when she was apparently shoved, according to police.

A second woman told police the man had approached her minutes earlier and she feared he would push her on to the tracks.

The suspect, whose name has not yet been released, has a criminal history and has been on parole, Wilcox said.

Charges against him in connection with the alleged subway attack were pending, Wilcox said.

Subway conditions and safety have become a worry for some New Yorkers during the pandemic. Although police statistics show major felonies in the subways have dropped over the past two years, so has ridership, making it difficult to compare.

Several riders were slashed and assaulted by a group of attackers on a train in lower Manhattan in May, and four separate stabbings, two of them fatal, happened within a few hours on a single subway line in February.

In recent months, there have been several instances of people being stabbed, assaulted or shoved on to the tracks at stations in the Bronx, Brooklyn and at Times Square.

Under his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, the city repeatedly said it was deploying more police to subways after attacks last year and pressure from transit officials. The agency that runs the subway system, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, sped up work to install security cameras in all 472 subway stations citywide, finishing that project in September.

With Associated Press