A Sunday morning stabbing on the 2 train

As Saturday night turned into Sunday morning, two men were fatally stabbed on a Brooklyn-bound 2 train. What happened on the train remains something of a mystery, but as more information comes to light, the tale is a particularly grisly one.

I first saw the news in The Times on Sunday morning when it was nothing more than a short report from the Associated Press. By the evening, their reporting had turned into a longer story with some details. Two groups of young men boarded the Brooklyn-bound 2 train making local stops. The first got on at 42nd St; the second got off later.

Somewhere in between 14th St. and Christopher St., Darnell Morel and Ricardo Williams were stabbed multiple times, and police stopped the train at Houston St. The assailants fled, and the two victims were both pronounced dead on arrival at St. Vincent. A third stabbing victim, says the report, remains in stable condition at the hospital.

The Daily News and The Post provided different takes on the story with the help of the victims’ friends. Apparently, ten friends were on the way back from a night out at the Cellar Bar in the Bryant Park Hotel. At 14th St., one of the group threw a bag of garbage out of the train car and hit another passenger on the platform. He and his three friends got agitated and pulled a knife. As the group tried to calm down the potential assailant, Morel and Williams were stabbed. “When we left, he stood banging on the glass with the knife in his hand,” Bryan Woods, a friend of the two victims, said to The Daily News. “[He was] laughing like he knew he got one of us.”

Cops are still looking for alleged attackers and are trying to piece together a more complete story. Both Morel and Williams, reported The Times, had arrest records. For the papers, this is a story of the city’s increased homicide rate. The subways, relatively crime-free for years, haven’t seen a spike in petty crime, but across the city, the murder rate has been climbing. Is it, as some bemoan, a return to the 1980s? “I feel like the city is losing its grip,” Liz McCarvill, a West Village resident, said to The Post. “I have to take the subway at 4:30 in the morning to get to the airport. It’ll be me and the people who kill each other.”

That is, I think, an overstatement borne out of fear when someone is attacked and murdered on your train. I ride the 2 train regularly, and I knkow McCarvill’s concerns. Still, what happened yesterday morning is similar to the murder that took place on the D train in November. There, one rider refused to remove his bags from a seat for another rider, and that other rider killed his co-straphanger over a seat. The lessons I offered up in November served as a reminder to be wary of those around you on the train. Most New Yorkers are calm and collected; they won’t snap at an obvious mistake. But the one guy out of 100 who does can mean harm.

I want to know more about this garbage bag that was tossed from a train and the reaction of the alleged killers to that bag. The subways and streets of new york City are safe, but sometimes safety can lead to complacency. A tragedy on the 2 train yesterday didn’t need to happen.