Twenty-nine hours into the citywide search for the man who shot ten people on an express train in Brooklyn on Tuesday morning, the N.Y.P.D. Crime Stoppers hotline received a tip, called in from a McDonald’s in the East Village. The tipster was the suspect himself, Frank Robert James, who then ambled off. Photos of James, who is sixty-two, had been circulating widely. They showed a heavyset Black man with a shaved or bald head, and dark circles beneath his eyes. At around 1:40 p.m. on Wednesday, N.Y.P.D. patrol officers from the Ninth Precinct found James at the corner of St. Mark’s Place and First Avenue, and put him in handcuffs. At a quickly assembled press conference, Mayor Eric Adams beamed in from Gracie Mansion, where he is in COVID-19 isolation, and said, “My fellow New Yorkers, we got him.”
A voluminous history of YouTube videos, dating back years, had surfaced in relation to the case. A man fitting James’s description, calling himself the Prophet of Truth and the Prophet of Doom, appeared in many dozens of videotaped monologues that he posted online. His diatribes involved 9/11 conspiracies, the war in Ukraine, “the matrix,” and dark forces that he believed would use atomic weapons to “streamline, reshape, resize” the world: “The United States will be ruined, just like Egypt, Greece, and all the rest of that shit.” He declared that humankind should be “wiped the fuck out.” In early March, he posted a thirty-one-minute video titled “AND NOW I AM BECOME DEATH,” a quote attributed to Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who expressed regret for his role in creating the atomic bomb.
Some of the videos show the man sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked vehicle, sweaty after having visited a gym. Other times, he appears in a darkened room, wearing tinted glasses, with the virtual desktop of his personal computer as the visual backdrop. In one video, he scrolls through the files (including a thumbnail photo) of Anthony Ferrill, who in 2020 shot and killed five co-workers at the Molson Coors Beverage Company in Milwaukee, before killing himself. Other files are slugged “By-Any-Means-Necessary-Malcolm-X” and “MolotovFF.” A photo of the new Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, with her husband, Patrick, who is white, is partly slugged “WHITE MAN.” The YouTuber appears particularly preoccupied with Armageddon. Speaking to the camera, he says, “We have problems that have not even crossed our minds.” At another point, he says, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow it’s a fuckin’ wrap.” Folders on his computer are labelled “new york trip,” “new york trip #2,” and “NY APARTMENT.”
On August 8, 2019, the “Prophet,” saying that it was his sixtieth birthday, posted the first video in a six-part series, titled “phase one of my NY trip.” It opens in the Milwaukee airport at three-thirty in the morning. In recent years, James lived, or has lived, in the Milwaukee area, and at one point in Racine County. In the video, the narrator claims both that he has missed his flight and that the airline has cancelled it because of “fucking weather.” Chortling, he says that after having been sober since 2017, he is now intoxicated on “a half pint of Jim Beam.” He is waiting for a flight that will route him through Philadelphia, where he says that he lived in 2007.
The video series continues in Newark, but the man’s destination is an apartment building on Ritter Place, in the Bronx, where he says that he was born. He takes New Jersey Transit into the city, complaining, “Public transportation is just as raggedy now as when I was a baby.” In Chinatown, he rents a hotel room.
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That night, the man stands outside what he calls his first address in life, in the Bronx’s Claremont neighborhood, and points out the basement apartment where he says that his family once lived. He worries aloud about bumping into a “fake cousin, that piece of shit,” but otherwise sounds elated to be back in “the motherfuckin’ B-X!” Getting loud, he tries to wake up the apartment building’s residents so that they can wish him a happy birthday. When he spots people walking toward him, on the street, he jokes about being shot: “I hope they ain’t strapped.”
Videos he created over the next five days feature his complaints about New York’s archaic subways, service outages, and busted escalators: “Par for the course, for the city.” The crowds bother him. Everything seems to. He yearns to visit Canal Street but laments that “they done gentrified Canal Street.” His monologues generally involve a theme: that Black Americans have “never known freedom” and that they have become too complacent. It is too late for change, he says: “You can’t turn a domesticated dog into a wolf.” He says that some Black Americans have gotten “too comfortable,” comparing them to “dumb fucking farm animals” unaware that they are headed for slaughter. In “there is no happy ending,” a video posted last June, he predicts doom but also rebirth. In a separate, ten-minute diatribe called “DEATH,” he declares that “if nothing never died, nothing could live.”
The man appeared to blame Mayor Adams and others in the New York area for not helping him with his mental problems. The A.P. reported that James had been a patient at a mental-health facility in New Jersey called Bridgeway Behavioral Health Services and that he once said, “My goal at Bridgeway in 1997 was to get off Social Security and go back to fucking work.” Bridgeway could not be reached for comment, but one of the folders visible in at least one video by the “Prophet” was slugged “BRIDGEWAY.” In a video posted several weeks ago, the man showed photographs of people whom he said had let him down. Without naming them, he declared, “They made me worse! They fucking made me worse. They made me more dangerous than anybody could ever fucking imagine.”
YouTube removed James’s “prophet” channel around the time of his arrest. In one of the last videos I watched, the YouTuber advised his followers to make peace with the inevitability of either perishing in Armageddon or being “taken into captivity in a FEMA camp or wherever they’re gonna take you.” Otherwise, they could decide to “just say fuck it—you know, go on a building and jump the fuck off. Put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, I don’t know. How would you do it?”
On Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged James with carrying out a terrorist attack on a mass-transit system. Investigators were piecing together his moves. Video circulated, showing James struggling to pass through a subway turnstile on Tuesday morning with a black backpack and a black wheeled case; he was dressed bulkily, in a neon safety jacket with reflective trim, and a yellow hard hat, both of which looked new. He also wore a black face mask and black gloves.
It is difficult to think of a worse scenario than what the passengers on the crowded N train then encountered as the northbound train pulled out of the Fifty-ninth Street station. A man sitting in a rear corner of the second car calmly put on a gas mask and unleashed one smoke device, then another. The passenger sitting next to him reportedly asked, “What did you do?,” to which he supposedly replied, “Oops.” As the subway car filled with smoke, he opened fire with a Glock 9-millimetre semi-automatic pistol. Passengers rushed away from him, but there was nowhere to go.
When the train pulled into the next station, at Thirty-sixth Street, in Sunset Park, passengers streamed, coughing and bleeding, onto the platform. Some collapsed, dazed and losing large amounts of blood. Others crossed over to an R train, which left the station, carrying them to safety. James was believed to have been among them; when the train next stopped, at Twenty-fifth Street, he allegedly slipped into a city of more than eight million people.
Investigators recovered a Glock, a credit card, and keys to a U-Haul van that they said James had rented in Philadelphia on Monday. The contents of the van suggested that he had slept in it. The authorities also found a hatchet, a container of gasoline, and fireworks. Hundreds of police detectives scrutinized footage from the city’s thousands of surveillance cameras. All four hundred and seventy-two of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s stations contain security cameras, but those at the Sunset Park hub had been inoperable.
Yet by Wednesday investigators had found footage that they said showed James passing through subway stations at King’s Highway, not far from where the van was discovered, and in Park Slope. At Wednesday’s press conference, convened immediately after James’s arrest, the New York City police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, declared that, given the intensity of the manhunt, there was “nowhere left for him to run.” The N.Y.P.D.’s chief of detectives, James Essig, revealed that in the nineties James was arrested nine times in New York and twice in New Jersey. The charges ranged from disorderly conduct and possession of burglary tools to a sex act.
Investigators had learned that James bought the recovered Glock in 2011, at a pawn shop near Columbus, Ohio. Breon Peace, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said that prosecutors would prove that he had “travelled across a state line in order to commit the offense, and transported materials across a state line in aid of the commission of the offense.” James, who faces a possible life sentence, made his first appearance in court on Thursday. The judge ordered him held without bail. James’s attorney asked that he receive psychiatric care.
A striking aspect of the footage that has emerged since Tuesday involves bystanders’ behavior during and after the shooting. Many responded as humans often do in dramatic situations—they tried to help. Many also responded as no one should ever do in an active-shooter scenario—when presented with an escape route, they instead stopped to record videos. Decades’ worth of U.S. gun violence has proved the critical importance of immediately fleeing the danger zone if it is safe to do so, yet Tuesday’s footage shows people lingering, at their own peril, in order to capture images on their cell phones. The New York City emergency-management department offers explicit instructions regarding active shooter situations, in a Web slide titled “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”:
One widely circulated photo from the subway attack shows a man correctly holding pressure on a victim’s abdominal wound, using the full weight of his body. In another photo, a man appears to address a victim’s leg wound by applying some sort of improvised tourniquet. It is upsetting to imagine having to carry around an actual tourniquet, as combat soldiers, police officers, and medics do, just in case. But a person can bleed to death in as little as five minutes. And, arguably, it can be empowering to carry a tourniquet—and to know how to use it. As I reported in 2019, a program called Stop the Bleed provides quick, simple instructions on how ordinary people, when properly trained, can save lives.
Intentional mass-casualty events have become so widespread in America that they are now considered a public-health crisis. The National Institutes of Health define a mass-casualty incident as one that overwhelms a hospital system. A mass shooting may be defined as one in which four or more people are killed or injured. Tuesday’s attack was the latter. It renewed pressures on the M.T.A. to provide contingency plans for disabled passengers and for others whose mobility is limited, and it reinvigorated debates about subway crimes and gun violence, both of which have worsened during the pandemic.
In February, the city announced plans to deploy more uniformed officers in the subway, though it is hard to know whether increased police visibility would have deterred the kind of assault that James allegedly carried out. Better mental-health services may well have, though. The ongoing investigation could reveal gaps that, if addressed, might have prevented harm.
The U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing a case that may create even more gaps in public safety. New York has long had the nation’s most restrictive gun laws, but the case challenges the city’s longstanding ban on most civilians legally possessing firearms. The thought of even more guns circulating in such a densely populated area alarms Adams, a former career N.Y.P.D. officer. He recently said, “This is frightening, what is about to play out on the stage of the Supreme Court.” An overturned law would arguably make the kind of mass violence that happened on Tuesday even more likely.