A gunman shot a 17-year-old boy and a man in his 40s inside a moving subway car as it approached a station in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood during the evening rush hour on Tuesday, the police said.
The shooting occurred just after 5:30 p.m. on a northbound C train as it pulled into the Ralph Avenue station, the police said.
The 17-year-old sustained an injury to his right hand and was taken to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, the police said. The man was shot in the left ankle and was taken to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, the police said. Both were in stable condition Tuesday night, the police said.
It was unclear whether the gunman, who fled the scene, and the victims knew one another. No arrests had been made as of Tuesday night, and the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the shooting, including what precipitated it, was continuing, the police said.
The shooting prompted the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates New York City’s subway system, to shift northbound C trains to run express between Broadway Junction and Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets for about two hours as the investigation proceeded.
After spiking during the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of shootings in New York City has continued to fall since last year, according to Police Department data.
Through Nov. 26, the data shows, shootings were down about 25 percent compared with the same period in 2022; the number of shooting victims was down about 28 percent.
Major felonies on New York’s transit system account for a tiny fraction of the city’s overall crime, and the chances of falling victim to crime in the subway are statistically low. An analysis by The New York Times in October estimated the rate of violent crimes in the system to be about 1.8 per one million rides.
Gunfire on the city’s subway and buses is rare. Through Nov. 26, the Police Department’s Transit Bureau had reported five shootings this year, compared with nine in the same period in 2022.
But several of the shootings last year — including the killing of a 48-year-old man by a stranger on a Sunday morning Q train and a mass shooting on a rush-hour N — combined with other violent crimes helped fuel some New Yorkers’ concerns about whether the subway was safe.
More recently, a 34-year-old man was shot early on a Saturday morning in January on a moving subway train in Lower Manhattan. He was struck once in the torso and taken to a hospital in stable condition, the police said.
This month, a Queens man was charged with criminal possession of a weapon and menacing after, the police said, he fired two shots at a homeless man who was trying to rob a woman in a Manhattan subway station.
No one was hit by the gunfire, but Richard Davey, the president of New York City Transit, said at the time that the episode showed how overrun with guns New York City had become.
“What happens in the street can come down to our subway,” Mr. Davey said. “We need to get a handle on the gun issue in the city.”
Ana Ley contributed reporting.
