.ericlach reports on the issues that have plagued the Jamaica Center-Parsons/Archer subway station in Queens, where, last month, a 24-year-old man was shot and killed.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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