The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office said it will not prosecute the subway rider who disarmed and shot a 36-year-old man after he was stabbed last week.
The New York City Mayor’s Office said via X after the incident: “A suspect has been taken into custody and a firearm has been recovered.”
In the chilling viral video, a heated exchange is captured between two men, and later, a woman becomes involved. The video showed Dajuan Robinson confronting another man, Younece Obuad, repeatedly saying, “I love my Blacks, that’s it. F–k you. F–k you. F–k your kind. Fuck your race. I love my Blacks.”
“I will beat you up,” Robinson says before the two men then begin fighting while passengers scramble away.
A woman then stabs the Robinson in his back. “You stabbed me?” the man says a few times. “I am locking you up when you get off. … I am bleeding.”
The woman replied, saying, “I didn’t do nothing.” He then retrieved a gun from his jacket and repeated the question, “You stabbed me, didn’t you?”
Before multiple shots were fired, Obuad, 32, managed to wrestle the gun away. Robinson was rushed to a hospital and is currently in critical but stable condition.
The video captured by a passenger also showed the chaos that ensued among the remaining individuals on the train as they rushed to try to find safety. Several pleaded to exit before the doors opened, and a frantic rush ensued as they fled for their lives.
Some passengers were trampled in the pandemonium, leaving many traumatized by the experience, ABC 7 reported. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority advises that in the event of an immediate threat to your subway car, you should relocate to another car.
A passenger on the train told ABC 7: “It’s something you don’t want to ever experience in your life. When I flew, everybody followed me and went on top of me.”
The man who pulled the trigger appears to have acted in self-defense, prosecutors say, and will not face charges as of now, according to several reports.
“The investigation into this tragic incident is ongoing but, at this stage, evidence of self-defense precludes us from filing any criminal charges against the shooter,” Oren Yaniv, spokesperson for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, said in a statement.
Thursday’s shooting inside the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station was a week after New York Gov. Hochul’s announcement of hundreds of National Guard members and state police deployed to the subway system and other mental health initiatives.
After the violent altercation on the Brooklyn subway that left a man in critical condition, New York officials pushed back against ongoing criticism surrounding safety and ensured the effectiveness of a new subway safety plan.
Over the weekend, Hochul told reporters during a St. Patrick’s Day parade that her new safety initiative, which involves using members of the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies to flood the subways, has been working, as reported by the New York Post.
“My objective was to make sure [the National Guard is] in our main transit hubs – you see them at Grand Central [Station] and other places, so they can free up [NYPD cops],” Hochul said. “So the plan is working as we had expected.”
Also present at the parade was New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who blasted comments about the city’s safety issues after recent violent attacks, the incident where Robinson was shot four times as terrified passengers watched.
Adams told Q104.3 before marching in the Saturday parade that the Big Apple remains the safest big city across the country and the city is “resilient,” according to the New York Post.
“I … want to say to New Yorkers: listen, people want to give the energy of because of isolated incidents that happen in our city that our city is a place of disorder …,” Adams said. “This is the safest big city in America. We are the best city on the globe, period. None of all that other stuff. It’s just maddening.”
