A 34-year-old man was killed and five other people, including two teenagers, were wounded on Monday in a shooting at the Mount Eden Avenue subway station in the Bronx during the evening rush hour, the police said.
The wounded people, who ranged in age from 14 to 71, were in stable condition and were expected to recover, the police said.
Police officials said the shooting erupted amid a dispute between two groups of teenagers who were on a northbound No. 4 train at about 4:30 p.m.
When the train arrived at the Mount Eden station and people began to get off, someone involved in the dispute fired a shot, Michael M. Kemper, the Police Department’s chief of transit, said at a news conference. The gunfire continued as riders spilled onto the platform and ran for cover, Chief Kemper said.
Officers responding to several 911 calls about gunfire at the station found the six victims on the northbound platform, the chief said. In addition to the man who was killed, those who were shot included a 14-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy, a 29-year-old woman, a 28-year-old man and a 71-year-old man.
Yanesa Ortega, an M.T.A. bus driver who has lived in the area for five years, said she was walking home near the station when the shooting occurred.
“We heard a lot of shots when the train stopped,” Ms. Ortega, 29, said in Spanish. She added, “The bullets fell under the station.”
She described seeing a young woman sitting on the station steps, blood coming from the area of her jaw.
“We saw everybody screaming and running down the stairs,” Ms. Ortega said.
Heriberto Paredes was at work at the Master Mufflers shop on Jerome Avenue when he heard gunfire, he said.
“What I heard sounded like a battlefield,” Mr. Paredes, 52, said, also speaking in Spanish.
He said that he and a young man had provided first aid to the young woman Ms. Ortega described. “Her whole coat was covered in blood,” he said.
“I could see the despair on people’s faces,” Mr. Paredes added, “wondering how something like this could happen in a city that’s supposedly safe.”
Police officials said that they were seeking at least one person in connection with the shootings and that they had downloaded security footage from cameras at the station as part of the investigation.
After spiking during the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of shootings in New York City has continued to fall, according to Police Department data. There were 974 shootings in the city last year, a 25 percent decline from 2022, the data shows.
Major felonies on New York’s transit system account for a tiny fraction of the city’s overall crime rate, 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 especially unusual. The Police Department’s Transit Bureau reported six shootings in the subway last year, compared with nine in 2022.
But several of the shootings in 2022 — 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 — and other violent crimes have helped fuel some New Yorkers’ concerns about whether the subway is safe, complicating transit officials’ efforts to bring ridership back to prepandemic levels.
Shootings in the subway last year included one involving a 34-year-old man who was shot early on a Saturday in January on a moving train in Lower Manhattan and another in which a Queens man was charged with criminal possession of a weapon after, the police said, he fired two shots at a homeless man who was trying to rob a woman at a Manhattan station.
Last month, a 45-year-old father and grandfather who worked as a crossing guard was fatally shot aboard a No. 3 train in Brooklyn after intervening in a dispute between two other passengers over loud music in the car, the police said.
Speaking at the news conference on Monday, Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, credited Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams for “doing everything possible to get guns off the streets.”
Still, Mr. Lieber said, “New York’s heart breaks when people who are headed home and kids are coming home from school to do their homework and they’re subjected to random acts of violence like what occurred here late this afternoon.”