NEW YORK — The subway operator who drove the N train Tuesday as a crazed gunman opened fire on straphangers said the attack could have been much worse if a rider had pulled the emergency brake cord.
David Artis was the first person to call in the shooting on the train as it crawled northbound between the 59th and 36th Street stations in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The train was moving slowly — about 5 or 10 mph — due to congestion on the tracks ahead, he said.
“The riders were knocking on my cab door like they wanted information or directions, but to us that’s an everyday thing,” said Artis, a 14-year transit veteran who’s driven trains for four years. “I had to stop for a red signal, I looked back and saw what was going on and called it in.”
Artis, 47, radioed the subway’s rail control center about the shooting at 8:23 a.m., alerting cops to the incident for the first time. The N train pulled into the 36th St. station at 8:25 a.m., internal MTA reports show.
Artis said Thursday night he was counting his blessings that no passengers pulled the emergency brake. That would have given the accused shooter Frank James, 62, time to fix his 9mm Glock, which police said jammed after he fired 33 shots.
“Had somebody pulled the emergency cord, he might gave had time to figure out his gun jam. Thank God nobody pulled the cord” said Artis. “When you pull the emergency brakes, the train would not have moved until you reset the cord.”
The type of train Artis operated on the N line was built in the 1970s and has an old school emergency brake in each car with a red handle. Because the train was old, Artis said he “would have had to go from car to car to find which brake cord was pulled.”
When Artis pulled into the 36th Street station, he saw a chaotic scene of people scrambling out of the train’s second car, which was filled with smoke from a cannister set off by the attacker.
He checked on some of the injured — and told the rail control center via radio that some of the people who were shot on his train moved onto an R train across the platform and were headed to the 25th Street station.
“He fired so many shots, somehow no one died,” said Artis. The NYPD reported 10 people were shot in the attack and another 13 were injured.
Artis worked through the COVID-19 pandemic as thousands of Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers were sickened. He worked relief shifts, filling in for workers on different lines. He works four days a week on the D line — and Tuesday was his one weekly shift on the N line.
He did his job by the book — and it may have saved lives.
“At the end of the day we all want the same thing, and that’s to go home to our families the same way we left them and to do our jobs safe and sound,” Artis said.
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