Last week, as I sat at a desk in a hotel room in lower Manhattan where I was traveling for work, my phone buzzed. A friend who knew I was in New York had texted to ask if I was all right. Bewildered, I sent a question mark back in response, and turned to Twitter for real-time answers as to what was going on. And there was the news: a man had opened fire inside a subway car as it pulled into a station in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, shooting what we’d eventually learn to be 10 people, and injuring more than a dozen others either with bullet grazes or smoke inhalation from smoke grenades he’d thrown. (Mercifully, no one was killed, and reports are that no one still hospitalized has life-threatening injuries.)
In the aftermath, the shooter vanished as if a ghost.
