A Subway Shooting That New York City Overlooked

A murder at the Jamaica Center–Parsons/Archer station in Queens has exposed many of the problems facing the city’s transit system.
The inside of the Jamaica CenterParsonsArcher subway station in Queens.
Photographs by Sean Sirota for The New Yorker

Crime has surged lately in the New York City subway system, though shootings remain rare. In April, there were two. The first took place during the morning commute on April 12th, aboard an N train in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. A disturbed drifter named Frank James allegedly set off smoke bombs and began firing a handgun in a crowded train car, shooting ten people. Miraculously, everyone lived. (Police took James into custody the following day.) The second shooting occurred nearly two weeks later, at the Jamaica Center–Parsons/Archer station, in Jamaica, Queens. On the afternoon of April 25th, two men got in a fight near the turnstiles at the eastern end of the station. One pulled out a gun and shot the other man twice in the chest and once in the groin. No miracles here. The man who was shot, a twenty-four-year-old named Marcus Bethea, died soon afterward. Police have identified a suspect but have not yet made an arrest in the case.

The day after the shooting at Parsons/Archer, the governing board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the city’s buses and subways, welcomed Governor Kathy Hochul to its monthly meeting in lower Manhattan. Eighteen transit workers were also on hand, to receive commendations for their service during the Sunset Park shooting. “No one ever expects to see bloodstained platforms, or people on the ground with wounds,” Hochul told them. “But you reacted like professionals, and you made us all so very proud.” The transit workers then posed for photographs alongside the Governor and the newly appointed M.T.A. chairman, Janno Lieber.

Every month, the board meeting allots more than an hour of time for public comment. Anyone with an issue about the largest transit system in the country can address the people in charge of it. Sitting in the back of the room, listening to the public comments—about the needs of disabled riders, about the fears and frustrations of transit workers, about the importance of data transparency in government—I was surprised at how few of the commenters dwelt for long on the Sunset Park attack, which, out in the wider world, had been treated like some kind of revelation about the city’s social fabric. (As the Times put it, the shooting was “a case that shocked a city already on edge about subway crime.”) The commenters were more concerned about the murder at Jamaica Center–Parsons/Archer, a crime that had managed to be both deadlier and more obscure. Several speakers bemoaned the deteriorated state of the station where Bethea was shot, and criticized the city’s inability or refusal to do anything about it. They made the incident sound directly related to broader issues facing the subway system, which has yet to recover from the disruptions of the pandemic. “We’re not getting answers,” Charlton D’souza, the founder of a small transit advocacy group called Passengers United, who offered his public comment via a video call from his apartment in Queens, said. “The public deserves better.”

In 2019, thirty-four thousand people passed through the Parsons/Archer station every weekday, making it the twenty-eighth most transited of New York’s four hundred and twenty-four subway stations.

Parsons/Archer is a working-class commuting hub. It is the end of the J line, a stop on the E line, and a transfer point for bus lines from all over southeast Queens and inner Long Island. The Queens County Family Court building is just across the street, and Queens High School for the Sciences is around the corner. In 2019, pre-pandemic, thirty-four thousand people passed through the station every weekday, making it the twenty-eighth most transited of the four hundred and twenty-four subway stations in New York City. Built in the nineteen-eighties, it’s a long, cavernous space, with two platforms stacked on top of each other—one for the E train and one for the J train—and entrances at either end. The buses stop directly overhead, at street level.

“That station has been a nightmare,” D’souza told me, when I called him after the board meeting. This year, despite police increasing the frequency of patrols in the station, major crimes are being reported there at a rate of about one every two weeks. Leading up to Bethea’s murder, there had been several other shootings in the neighborhood, including a fatal one, in January, on Jamaica Avenue, three blocks from the station. Ridership at Parsons/Archer is about sixty per cent of what it was before the pandemic, and conditions in the station are as bad as anyone can remember. D’souza described walls and floors covered with dust, trash, and debris, and corridors and stairwells lit by yellow, dull light. Many homeless people take refuge in the station, some of them in visibly rough shape, yet outreach efforts have had little success connecting them to resources and services. Drugs are sold and used in and around the station. Human urine and feces frequently litter the ground. Many commuters who use the station are frustrated, exhausted, and wary. “These complaints go back years,” D’souza said. And now this awful shooting had happened. Someone died right by the turnstiles.

A few days later, I went to Parsons/Archer. D’souza met me at the corner of 158th Street and Archer Avenue, at a stairwell leading down into the station. Dozens of buses came and went along Archer, hydraulic brakes wheezing. D’souza is a small, intense man with a large round head and a beard with plenty of white in it. As the head of Passengers United, which he hopes to properly register as a nonprofit soon, he has been regularly attending and offering public comment at M.T.A. board meetings for years. He has an obsessive, granular interest in the subways, little patience for bureaucrats, and firsthand knowledge of the conditions at stations all over Queens. Some of his ideas seemed extreme and unworkable to me, such as his suggestion that the federal Transportation Security Administration be called in to secure the subway system. Officials know him as a gadfly. But they know him. “Do you want to see the bad and move to some of the better parts of the station?” he asked me. “Or start with the better and move to the bad?”

Lately, D’souza has been particularly concerned about the “swipers” at Parsons/Archer. I wasn’t familiar with the term, but once D’souza described it I realized that I knew what he meant. During the past two decades, swiping has become a common hustle across the subway system. Swipers, often young men, stand near turnstiles offering MetroCard swipes for two dollars cash—a discount from the official $2.75 fare. Many swipers operate by buying unlimited-ride MetroCards and then trying to sell enough two-buck swipes to surpass the initial capital outlay. Swiping can be a relatively sturdy trade underground. The demand for discount swipes is there. But so is the risk of arrest. From January through early May of this year, police made twenty arrests at Parsons/Archer. Nine were “related to swiper enforcement,” according to the N.Y.P.D. (A few years ago, the New York City public advocate raised concerns that police focussed their swiping-enforcement efforts on subway stations in poor minority neighborhoods.)

“I come home sometimes at 10:30 P.M., and it is so awful to come over here,” a woman who regularly uses the Parsons/Archer station said. “You get so afraid.”

Bethea, the young man who was killed in the station last month, was a swiper, according to the police and two other swipers I talked to. In January, he was arrested for the alleged “unauthorized sale of a fare card.” I’d seen a video online of the shooting’s aftermath, taken by a bystander: Bethea lying on his back, motionless, a handgun a few feet to his right, shell casings visible on the floor around him. The man who took the video had started recording after hearing gunfire, and kept recording for several minutes as he and other passersby, along with a few M.T.A. employees, hovered close to the body. “Yo, he’s not breathing,” the man says, at one point. “He’s not breathing, man.”

The police say there is currently no indication that the fight that led to Bethea’s death had anything to do with swiping, but in the past few years some swipers at Parsons/Archer have taken more aggressive steps toward securing their businesses. One swiper told me he’d been essentially run out of the station by competitors. Swipers have been known to vandalize MetroCard machines so that the machines are unable to accept cash. This forces riders who don’t have credit cards—poor people, young people—to pay the swipers for access to the station, and for everybody else it can create bottlenecks at the machines that do work. Now it’s not uncommon for every machine at Parsons/Archer to be vandalized in this way. Frequent commuters told me that swipers at Parsons/Archer have pressured them to pay two dollars for entry, regardless of the balance on their MetroCards. An M.T.A. clerk at a nearby station, who used to work at Parsons/Archer, told me even he has had trouble getting through Parsons/Archer without getting hassled. “It’s like the swipers ran the station,” he said.

D’souza looked around near a set of turnstiles. We were at the west end of the station, during the mid-afternoon lull. Sure enough, several of the first MetroCard machines that we walked by weren’t accepting cash, and one was completely out of order. D’souza expressed surprise at the floors, which were relatively clean. As it happened, an M.T.A. official had toured the station that morning. “It looks like it’s been power-washed,” D’souza said, squinting with amazement. But not every problem can be scrubbed away. D’souza pointed up at the light fixtures, cloudy with grime. He talked about how people were often sprawled out on the stairs on this side of the station. Overhearing this, a commuter passing by came up to him. “I come home sometimes at 10:30 P.M., and it is so awful to come over here,” she said. “You get so afraid.”

D’souza swiped through the turnstiles and walked down to the E and J train platforms. We talked to several of the station’s cleaners. “Usually it’s not this clean,” a young man named Juan told me. “It smells crazy. It smells like pee. Musty. Dirty. You have to put your mask on. I’ll be, like, ‘Thank God I have this mask.’ ” In February, Governor Hochul and New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, released a Subway Safety Plan focussed on getting homeless people out of the subway system. Among other things, the plan endorses a policy at end-of-line stops wherein everybody aboard a train is compelled to exit. Those found on J trains that reach Parsons/Archer are roused and brought into the station. I spoke to another cleaner standing in the doorway of an empty J car. The cleaner, who asked not to be named, said that she’d been working for the M.T.A. for sixteen years. She had a resigned, seen-it-all air, and shrugged off some of the station’s issues. “I’ve seen homeless all my life, all over the place,” she said. “The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens. Nothing’s different.” But she did say that Parsons/Archer gets worse late at night. A friend of hers who used to work there had transferred to another station two years ago. “She said it’s not safe here,” the cleaner said.

At the station’s eastern entrance, D’souza and I approached the bank of turnstiles where Bethea had been shot. “Right over here, that’s where he died,” D’souza said, pointing at a spot on the tiled floor right in front of a glass-windowed clerk’s station. Overhead, the dark bubbles of eight security cameras looked down. D’souza supports calls for more police in the subway system, but he is baffled at the way they currently operate. Adams has said he wants the police to achieve “omnipresence” in the subways: “People feel as though the system is not safe because they don’t see their officers.” Another part of the Subway Safety Plan involved sending a thousand extra officers into the subways. Parsons/Archer is patrolled regularly by both the N.Y.P.D. and a special contingent of M.T.A. police officers. But D’souza said he has often seen them huddled together in out-of-the-way corners of the station, or else sitting in their cars above ground.

Because the swipe trade was slow at Parsons/Archer that day, D’souza suggested we go one station up on the J line, to Sutphin Boulevard, which is a transfer point for the AirTrain, the tram to John F. Kennedy Airport. Swipers work the AirTrain station, too, which supplies a steady flow of potential customers all day long. The contrast between the two stations is stark. Whereas Parsons/Archer, run by the M.T.A., is dark and dank, the Sutphin Boulevard AirTrain station, run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is airy, white-walled, and sun-filled. When we arrived, its main hall was packed with snaking lines of tourists, suitcases in tow, trying to navigate the machines for MetroCards, AirTrain tickets, and Long Island Rail Road passes. It’s a confusing place even for a native New Yorker. Some Port Authority employees were directing traffic. I asked one about the swipers. “Why don’t you ask one of them,” he suggested. “There’s one.” He pointed at a tall guy in a bright-red Nike hoodie across the hall. I approached the swiper and told him that I was writing an article about the shooting at Parsons/Archer.

“Pony, yeah,” the man said, sadly, using a nickname he knew Bethea by.

The man introduced himself as Tyreek. He was thirty-four years old, he said, and he had been working as a swiper for almost two decades. He claimed he once was involved in the management of the swipe trade at Parsons/Archer. “Before it was my station, it was Weezy’s station, and before it was Weezy’s station it was Chris’s station,” Tyreek said. “I’m the head of the swipers, you know what I’m saying?” I asked him if it was true that the swipers had become more aggressive at Parsons/Archer. He said it was, and that he’d stopped working there partly as a result. When the pandemic hit, in the spring of 2020, he explained, subway ridership plummeted. Faced with a scarcity of potential customers, swipers became more desperate and competitive. “Certain people,” he said, had changed the nature of his trade in ways he found disturbing. “Even when it wasn’t profitable financially, it was profitable morally, at one point,” he said. He made a distinction between offering people discount swipes, or working the tourist trade, and hassling working people as they just tried to get by. I looked around. Certainly, Tyreek was not the only guy in town trying to make a living squeezing a few dollars out of tourists. “I provide a service,” Tyreek insisted. A woman wheeling a suitcase approached him. “Do you have change for a twenty?” she asked, in accented English. Tyreek dug into the front pocket of his hoodie and handed her the small bills.“I do a better job than them,” he said, pointing across the hall at the Port Authority workers. “But they won’t hire me.”

Mayor Eric Adams has said he wants police to achieve “omnipresence” in the subways.

What’s to be done about the subways is one of the big questions facing New York City right now. Earlier this week, I visited the M.T.A.’s offices to talk to Lieber, the agency’s new chairman. We met in a twentieth-floor conference room overlooking the Hudson River. Lieber is a confident, energetic man who previously helped manage the rebuild of the World Trade Center. He grew up in Manhattan and now lives in Brooklyn. Lately, he has been talking publicly about both the subway system’s slower-than-anticipated ridership rebound and the rise in reported crime numbers. At last month’s board meeting, a reporter asked him to address what “the line is between perception and reality of safety on the subway.” He replied, “I don’t know if I'm going to enter the Matrix with you on that one.”

During our conversation, he acknowledged the issues that have plagued Parsons/Archer, some of which he attributed to the station’s size. “It’s an incredibly important part of our transportation network,” he said. “The scale of that station, for better or worse, invites unplanned activities.” Many of the issues at Parsons/Archer, Lieber told me, are “long-term” problems. His particular focus right now is on combatting fare evasion and other violations of the subway system’s rules and norms, a topic which Mayor Adams has also been talking much about. Lieber considers swipers criminals and believes that their days are numbered, because a new system of digital turnstile scanners, OMNY, will soon have MetroCards going the way of the subway token. “Ultimately, the goal is to have the ability to do it all on the handheld, in some way,” he said, referring to riders’ smartphones. “The smartphone is part of almost everyone’s life.” Last month, Lieber announced that he was forming a “blue ribbon” panel to recommend responses to fare evasion. Like other city leaders, he insists that he will avoid mistakes made in the past in the name of public safety and the plans for his panel state that it will focus on “equity” and “education” as well as “enforcement.” I asked him what tools he thought were available beyond arrests and summonses. He talked about young people being “educable” and about changing the design of turnstiles and station-exit gates. The fare-evasion panel will also be looking for ways to increase participation in the city’s Fair Fares program, which offers discount MetroCards to New Yorkers living below the poverty line. Only two hundred thousand of the estimated eight hundred thousand New Yorkers currently eligible for the program use it.

My conversations with swipers were a reminder that the city can’t always anticipate the consequences of its policies—in the subways or anywhere else. At the AirTrain station, I asked Tyreek if he knew how swiping began. Did it go all the way back to the introduction of MetroCards, in the nineteen-nineties? No, he said. It really got going after a crackdown on fare evasion in the early two-thousands, when cops publicly prioritized arresting people for jumping the turnstiles. “They were locking you up like nothing,” Tyreek said. “They were fucking throwing you on the ground, literally, and locking you up. It sounds like nothing now—I’m thirty-four—but we were kids then.” Tyreek said the crackdown had made many would-be fare-beaters think twice, but it’s not as if they suddenly could afford the fare. Swipers stepped in to meet the demand for discount fares created by the city. It was an ad-hoc Fair Fares program, with no paperwork and no means-testing. “Through doing this, we learned so much shit,” Tyreek said. “We learned how to survive.”

A few days later, I returned to Parsons/Archer to catch the end of the morning commute. I stood near the place where Bethea was shot, and watched people stream through. The station was busy. That day, I saw homeless-outreach workers in orange windbreakers canvassing there. I also saw a good number of people jump the turnstiles. In the clerk’s booth, two uniformed cops chatted with the clerk. The turnstile-jumpers ignored their omnipresence. Many people using the station swiped themselves in, but others availed themselves of a slender swiper in a flat-brim cap. The swiper set up shop down a corridor, and he looked positively galant as he escorted his clients toward the turnstiles, swiped, and then ushered them through with a wave of his arm. He shook hands with people, and made small talk. “Morning.” “Morning.” “See you later, bro.” I watched him direct two women to a working MetroCard machine. “There, that one,” he said.

I approached the swiper, who agreed to talk to me as long as I didn’t print his name. He said he’d been working in the station for five years. For a time, he’d been working at a liquor store in addition to swiping. Then the pandemic hit, and he lost his job at the store. He said the station had got “rough” a few years ago, under the sway of some “troublemakers.” But he said those people were gone. “They left,” he said. As we spoke, a woman approached and asked the swiper if he had any unlimited MetroCards for sale. “Not today,” he said.

New York City has collectively paused to gasp at a number of grisly crimes in the past two years, but Bethea’s murder wasn’t one of them. The police held a press conference at Parsons/Archer shortly after the shooting, but media coverage of the case was minimal. Adams, who has made a point of visiting crime scenes during his first months in office, didn’t attend. The swiper with the flat-brim cap said he’d been in the station the day Bethea was shot. He’d known Bethea. He’d seen him lying on the ground. “That had nothing to do with swiping,” he said. “It just happened.”

A security monitor picturing where Bethea was shot. A video posted online following the shooting shows Bethea lying on his back, motionless, a handgun a few feet to his right.