Ignore Mamdani’s gaslighting — NYC subway violence is worse than you bear in mind

When Decarlos Brown, Jr., fatally pierced 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska’s throat on a Charlotte, NC, commuter train last August, the horror made global news.

Last week’s fatal shoving of 76-year-old Ross Falzone down a flight of Manhattan subway steps commands equal outrage for what it says about the city’s steep decline in transit safety.

For decades, New York succeeded in keeping its transit system safe.

Recently, we’ve just given up on doing it.  

For any transit rider, watching the video of Falzone in the seconds before his murder conjures the same emotions video of Brown’s random attack on Zarutska evoked. 

We see Falzone, a retired teacher, confidently walking down Chelsea’s 18th Street toward the subway steps, backpack slung over his shoulders.  

He feels no danger; he appears to be reading a piece of paper.

Then another man, allegedly 32-year-old Rhamell Burke, steps into the frame, stretching his arms in one motion toward Falzone.

He catapults the older man forward, smashing Falzone’s head into the steps.  

We all like to think that we, streetwise and transit-wise, would never suffer such a fate. 

The footage reveals this to be self-delusion; neither Zarutska nor Falzone could have saved themselves. 

New Yorkers who can grasp facts feel another emotion, too: frustration and anger.  

Falzone’s was the fourth subway killing of 2026.

Three of these deaths were stranger-on-stranger crimes, the kind of violence people fear most.  

Falzone’s murder wasn’t even the first transit eldercide of 2026. 

In March Bairon Hernandez, 34, fatally flung Richard Williams, an 83-year-old military veteran, onto the subway tracks at Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street. 

And Falzone’s death wasn’t  the only recent instance of murder by stairs.

In July 2021, a suspect pulled 58-year-old Than Htwe down the Q train steps at Canal Street, killing her; a year before, another man was pushed to his death on the Penn Station steps.  

These murders aren’t anecdotes.  

They are part of a dataset that illustrates how much more deadly our subways are now, compared to seven years ago. 

Since 2020, New York has suffered 47 subway murders, along with at least five justified homicides, including the police killing of a machete-wielding head-hacker at Grand Central last month.  

That’s an average of eight murders a year over the past six years.  

This is not normal.

In the 23 years between 1997 and 2019, New York never had a year with more than five subway murders.

And it suffered just two years — 1999 and 2005 — with even that many.  

Over this two-decade period, the average number of killings in the transit system each year was two — and in 2017, it reached zero. 

Unsurprisingly, serious transit-system violence that sometimes results in murder is also up: Over six years from 2020 through 2025, New Yorkers, visitors, transit workers and police officers suffered 3,125 life-changing felony assaults in the subways — a level that previously took 13 years to reach. 

Now, we’re on our third mayor who is overseeing four times the level of subway killings that New Yorkers accepted between the late 1990s and 2019.  

And when we complain about it, we’re gaslit — from the Bill de Blasio-era NYPD saying the problem was “fearmongering,” to Eric Adams saying it was a matter of “perception,” to Mamdani’s NYPD implying, this month, that things are just fine — when in fact violent subway felonies were up nearly 7% in the first quarter of this year.  

What is going wrong?  

Adams, spurred by Gov. Kathy Hochul and state funding, deployed hundreds of NYPD officers on overtime shifts in the subway beginning in 2022, and Mamdani has kept them. 

The state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city have deployed police-backed teams of mental-health workers to get disturbed people out of transit.  

But once police arrest violent suspects or clinicians call for mental evaluation, suspects or patients don’t stay in jail or in the hospital.  

The man who allegedly killed Williams in March — an illegal migrant — had racked up 15 arrests. 

Police had arrested Burke, the suspect in Falzone’s killing, four times since February, including for violent subway behavior; he was released every time.  

And police brought Burke to Bellevue for psychiatric evaluation hours before he allegedly pushed Falzone — and was released again.   

Burke’s psychosis may have been drug-induced, meaning that he had calmed down by the time a doctor assessed him. He behaved normally in court this weekend.  

Yes, we must fix our mental-health system — Hochul and Adams made progress  — but no elected official wants to admit that we’ve also got to enforce laws against low-level illegal drug sales, possession and use. 

And fare evasion, though lower than its 14% peak in 2024, is still at 10.6%, more than twice as high as before 2020.

Farebeating is an indicator of antisocial behavior: Just last week, cops who caught a teen turnstile-hopper at Coney Island found he was wanted for a Times Square murder. 

Mamdani and Hochul, you’re on notice: This is not normal.

New Yorkers haven’t forgotten the not-so-olden days of safe subways — and we want them back. 

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.