New York City police are asking for help in finding a man suspected of shoving another man to his death under a subway train in the Bronx on Sunday.
Wai Kuen Kwok, 61, died at the scene after being pushed under a southbound D train at the 167th Street and Grand Concourse station at about 8.44am. Kwok was standing on a platform with his wife when an unidentified man approached him from behind and shoved him, witnesses said.
“There was no fighting or anything like that, just a push,” a New York police department spokesperson told the Guardian. Police said witnesses saw no confrontation or altercation and that the attack appears to have been a random act of violence.
The attacker fled to the street while the victim’s wife screamed and sobbed, witnesses said. Police describe the suspect as a balding African American man.
Surveillance footage released by police shows the suspect stepping off the BX35 bus just minutes after the attack. Wearing a black leather jacket and white sneakers, he entered a storefront and then lingered on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. Police have asked the public to submit any information about the suspect or the attack to a Crime Stoppers website.
Metro Transit Authority trains have killed 50 people in 2014 including Sunday’s death, suicides and accidents, an MTA spokesperson said. Instances of platform violence are rare, however. In November 2013 a homeless man in Harlem pushed an elderly rider, who was saved by other passengers. In December 2012 two attacks disconcerted passengers, when weeks after a fatal attack in Queens a woman with a history of mental illness and drug arrests pushed an Indian immigrant in front of a 7 train, also in Queens. The assailants in those cases were charged with second-degree murder and murder as a hate crime, respectively.
Alfredo Brown, a witness on the track Sunday, told local news WWMT the incident had rattled him. “It’s not safe no more, it’s not safe,” Brown said. “I thought the train was safe, now I’m not safe. Now you need cameras on the train to watch the people going to work, people going to work. Now something like this has happened, it’s a tragedy.”
The Kwok family requested privacy and the victim’s son, Gary, asked the New York Times to “please tell the world he is a fine, family man.” Kwok’s wife was treated at Bronx-Lebanon hospital for shock. Neighbors and relatives described Kwok as kindly and close to his family, and said he and his wife were on their way to Chinatown for breakfast and grocery shopping on the morning of the attack.
