New York, New York

Two weeks ago, a lonely and angry man took the morning Manhattan bound rush hour N train from southwest Brooklyn. He came on board dressed for safety measures wearing a helmet and  MTA safety vest and lugging a hand rolling cart filled with firecrackers and smoke bombs. In between stations, this man was muttering to himself and started fumbling with the cart’s contents, then he put on a gas mask and ignited two smoke bombs and pulled out a 9mm gun and shot 33 rounds at his fellow commuters. During the fusillade he managed to hit 10 of them as 19 other people sustained injuries while trying to flee into the next car. Shockingly and luckily no one died from the incident, only because the man’s gun jammed and also because he wasn’t aiming for vital organs.

Like something from the beginning of an action movie or t.v. show, the man walked away from the chaos he caused after dumping the gear he was wearing and the cart in the train, then walked past people lying injured and bleeding on the 36th St. Station platform, past commuters fleeing for safety and walked across to the arriving R train and got off that train at the next station. Then he took a stroll to nearby Park Slope where he got on a bus to transfer to an F train station and got off in the Lower East Side while eluding hundreds of cops and FBI agents deployed to the scene of the crime.

Once the NYPD and the legacy local news media identified the shooter as Frank James, he was roaming around Brooklyn and Manhattan for over 30 hours until he got to his last destination in the East Village, where he stopped at a couple of high end restaurants and walked around and rested on a bench by a restaurant shanty in plain sight, all while the NYPD were in a frantic search to find him. When James went into a McDonalds on 1st Avenue, a man working at a shop next door recognized him and call the cops to pick him up and they finally collar him (it also turned out that there were four other witnesses who made reported calls, which also included James).

There hasn’t been much of a follow up about what motivated Frank James to start blasting people. In fact, we would know a lot more because he had a youtube channel with videos of him ranting about the rising crime and dysfunctional lack of public services that has turned NYC into its current dystopian state. In other words, James gripes mostly jibed with a vast majority of opinions of New Yorkers (according to Mayor Adams, who guesstimates this amount to 30 million every time he gets asked a question) including yours truly of this blog your reading here. But we will never ever know because youtube abolished his channel and banned his videos from public view (Although the NYPD actually could have that footage to use against him during his trial).

The last time a man committed a mass shooting on a New York transit line was when Colin Ferguson shot up a LIRR train also with an semi-automatic handgun and killed six people and maimed 19 others and during the morning rush.  The distinction about is not this that James didn’t kill anyone or that he was not of sound mind when he maimed his fellow commuters like Ferguson, but with the predominance of social media and networking, his motives were out there for all to see and his vulgar and racist social media disturbingly had validity to them which served as a portent for his own mass shooting in regards the myriad crises that are dominating New York City society. In a way, this actually resembles the Bernard Goetz shooting of four Black men back in 1984 when he decided to pack heat because of the relentless crime wave during the worst era of the bad old days. It even bears an unsettling resemblance to the cult horror classic movie “God Told Me Too”, where people also engaged in mass shootings and responded by getting their orders by man who lives in the clouds. This also was recently revealed by current Mayor Eric Adams who claimed that God told him to run for mayor(funny I thought it was Real Estate Board of New York who told him to).

Another aspect from the mass shooting is that the Bernie Goetz of the New Bad Days probably did it to become a viral sensation by manifesting his bloody fantasies. But what he actually did do was expose the kakistocracy that has overwhelmed NYC municipal services, the NYPD and the mass transit system as well. Because what pushed Frank James over the edge derived from the dearth in mental health services which Bill de Blasio and his tax boondoggle wife laundered a billion dollars from that still hasn’t been accounted for and the homeless service providers that James felt short changed him and left him despaired, anguished and furious. Plus it was recently exposed that one of the non-profit service providers James went to is a million and a half dollars in the red as it’s top executives continue to make six figure salaries. If James found out that the city has dedicated more funding for mental health services to nite club owners and their big spending patrons, he probably would have aimed higher.

There’s another disturbing aspect about James’ senseless hate-filled attack; the fact that he knew he could pull it off and with ease, despite his mishaps. Because the reason why James was able to trudge around two boroughs for a day and a half is that the cameras at the two stations were he got on and got off malfunctioned and the NYPD didn’t get a good description of him. At first James was described as being just 5 and a half feet tall instead of the over 6 ft. man that wound up plastered on cellphone screen social media apps, which enabled him to walk in public in plain sight as cops and federal agents headed to his crime scene. The NYPD claimed they didn’t have his description because the fiber optic cables didn’t transmit the footage fast enough.

The MTA’s own ass covering for this deficiency being that those Sunset Park station cameras happened to be the only ones that were out of service even though the other 10,000 that are in the transit system were working just fine that day. If only there was something the transit system bosses could have done to make sure those cameras were still working, like allocating money to keep them running 24/7/365 instead of pissing it away on marketing and advertising their minimally used OMNY pay and travel ads…

 

It’s laughingly ironic that the MTA would spend more expense and effort for these promotional gimmicks to be seen than for people behaving suspiciously. But this is the worst fucking transit system in the universe with a top brass that thinks it’s normal to keep a paper transit map up after putting up a digital screen map right next to it.

 

Frank James also made a mockery of N.Y.’s finest, who are collectively suffering an horrendous year as felonious crimes collectively rise nearly 50%.  Like when NYPD Commissioner Sewell praised her officers for tracking him down, it turned out James actually called the cops himself and told him where he was going to be, which Frank gleefully scoffed at them during his arrest by asking them what took them so long.

Mayor Adams was spared the embarrassment of this indignity mostly because he was holed up in Gracie Mansion with COVID-19 with a “rasbie” throat (his mangled words not mine). But still, James made Adams look like an idiot even more since he was able to smuggle a gun and ordinance into the transit system when three weeks earlier the Mayor and Governor Kathy “Clown” Hochul announced new units of extra cops and health professionals (basically subway orderlies) to be deployed to the stations to prevent criminal behavior, stop criminals and aid mentally disturbed folks. Then Mayor Adams proceeded to make an idiot out of himself by blaming social media for allowing him to post his vitriolic uploaded videos and posts on their platforms, even after they already deplatformed them. Even though the NYPD counter terrorism squad already has a unit to monitor terror threats domestic and international and used it very diligently tracking protesters during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. Too bad this dedication wasn’t present when Frank James mimicked a mass shooting attack on a subway train and promoting extreme measures and final solutions for his targets of indignation and frustration.

Another thing Frank James mass shooting exposed was obnoxious preening by the city’s fauxgressive establishment Democrat elected officials making dickhead self-promoting photo ops feigning to project strength while pathetically trying to muster inspiration for people to continue to use the subway and stay put in the city that is getting less safer every day.

It didn’t take that long for media’s interest in the subway mass shooting to vaporize, because “regular” shootings on the city streets continued to escalate, there were 15 shootings just days after his arrest and there was also a gory fatal attraction murder in Forest Hills that took over the news. But leave it Frank Adams to also make a gory mockery of Mayor Adams continuing failure to prevent gun violence by waiting months to get the NYPD anti-gun units out on the streets following rebranding them as “neighborhood safety teams” and making sure they get re-educated on constitutional rights for future stops and seizures. Which is something they should have learned in school and been reeducated during their academy training when stop and frisk was determined unconstitutional by a judge five years ago. It should also be pointed out that Frank James used a registered gun and not a ghost gun, the latter which is getting the most media attention and has become the weapon of choice on the streets.

So Frank James’ arraignment went down without even much of a peep or even a followup, which doesn’t provide any closure for his victims, one of whom lost the feeling in his legs and lost his job or genuine security for millions of commuters still wary of taking the subway again, but it’s provided solace and security for the kakistocracy that continues to fuck up New York City.