A crowd of terrified passengers struggled to flee while exiting a train at Brooklyn’s Fulton Street station after the shots were fired in last week’s shooting at the nearby Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop, multiple riders told Gothamist on Sunday.
An altercation at the busy station during rush hour on Thursday resulted in one passenger being shot in the head with his own gun on a northbound A train, according to police. One commuter, whose G train had left the station in the midst of the chaos, told Gothamist on Sunday that straphangers were stampeding toward the exits after their train stopped one station away at Fulton Street. They stood helplessly, she said, as they tried opening a nearby gate that would not budge.
Tim Minton, a spokesperson for the MTA, told Gothamist the agency does not lock emergency exit gates and the agency “has no report of any such issue.” The agency will be reviewing surveillance footage from the Fulton Street station, however, to see what transpired, he said.
The victim of the shooting – a 36-year-old man who MTA officials later identified as the “aggressor” in the altercation – remains in critical but stable condition. The same man is seen in NYPD surveillance footage avoiding the $2.90 fare by entering the Nostrand Avenue station through an emergency exit door before the shooting on Thursday.
“I just don’t know why the door would be locked,” said Joyce Bullock-Vigdor, who was aboard the G train stopping at Fulton Street. “Because it could’ve turned out so much worse if it was a bigger emergency.”
It began as an otherwise standard commute from work for Bullock-Vigdor, a 32-year-old elementary school teacher from Brooklyn. A ride on the A/C train at the Jay Street–MetroTech station placed her at Hoyt-Schermerhorn around 4:40 p.m., where she planned to transfer.
The sound of the G train’s arrival occurred at the same time that Bullock-Vigdor said she heard a pop.
“At first, I didn’t realize what it was,” she…
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