An 18-year-old woman heading home from work was shot in the chest by a masked robber on a Brooklyn subway platform late Sunday night, and police have yet to make an arrest.
Ashley Nicastro was waiting at the President Street, Medgar Evers College station around 11:45 p.m. when a man dressed in all black, wearing a red hat and a black face mask, walked up to her on the platform. He snatched a chain necklace from her neck, and during the scuffle that followed, he fired a single round into her chest, the New York Post reported. The suspect then fled up a nearby staircase and disappeared onto the street.
The necklace he stole had belonged to Ashley's late grandmother. Her father, Michael Nicastro, told the Post it was not even valuable. Ashley had no money on her.
Michael Nicastro did not mince words. Speaking to the Post after his daughter was discharged from Kings County Hospital on Monday, he made clear what he thought of the man who shot her.
"I hope the cops get to him before I do, because it's going to be pretty ugly for this guy."
He also described the stolen necklace, and the cruelty of the theft beyond the bullet wound itself.
"It wasn't even real. It was a necklace of my mother who'd passed away, and her. She was so close to my mother. And she didn't have any money on her."
Ashley survived because the round missed every major organ and blood vessel. Her father credited that narrow margin plainly: "Thank God he didn't hit any organs or major blood vessels." By Monday she was home, sedated and recovering. "Now she's sleeping. They gave her a whole bunch of drugs," he said.
The shooting fits a grim pattern of violent attacks inside New York City's transit system. Just weeks earlier, a subway rider was stabbed twice on a Queens J train, and that suspect also remained at large.
Officers responding to the shooting rushed Ashley Nicastro to Kings County Hospital, where she was listed in stable condition. Police used a phone ping to track her stolen bag to the intersection of Pacific Street and Utica Avenue, roughly 1.5 miles from the station where she was shot.
Despite that lead, no arrests had been made as of the Post's report. The investigation remained open, and police described the suspect only by his clothing, all black, red hat, black face mask. No name, no surveillance footage, and no further details about the gunman have been released publicly.
The questions left hanging are the ones New Yorkers keep asking. Was there any camera footage from the platform or the staircase the suspect used to flee? Were there witnesses beyond Ashley herself? Did officers recover the bag at the pinged location, or did the trail go cold? None of those answers appeared in the available reporting.
Ashley Nicastro was doing everything right. She was working. She was riding public transit home. She was waiting on a platform in a city that spends billions on policing and transit security. And a masked stranger shot her for a costume-jewelry necklace and an empty purse.
New York's leaders have spent years debating how to make the subway system safer, yet the city's mayor recently dropped a plan to add 580 new NYPD officers even as police unions warned of burnout and a dangerous summer ahead. Incidents like this one illustrate what that staffing gap looks like at street level, or, more precisely, at platform level, at a quarter to midnight.
Meanwhile, law-abiding New Yorkers remain largely unable to carry any meaningful tool for self-defense. The city's restrictive firearms laws are among the tightest in the nation, and a legal challenge to its ban on stun guns is currently before the Supreme Court. The armed criminal on that Brooklyn platform faced no such legal obstacles.
Violent offenders who face little prospect of swift arrest or serious prosecution have few reasons to hesitate. In Virginia, a suspect was recently arrested on rape and abduction charges only after a prosecutor had previously dismissed earlier offenses against him, a cycle of leniency that put more people at risk. The dynamic is familiar in cities across the country: officials weaken enforcement, and ordinary people absorb the consequences.
Ashley Nicastro is alive because a bullet missed her heart by inches. Her father's rage is the kind every parent understands. The masked man who shot her is still free. And the system that was supposed to protect an 18-year-old on a subway platform at night produced exactly what it was designed to produce, nothing, until after the damage was done.
When working people cannot ride the train home without getting shot, the policy has failed. The only question is whether anyone in charge cares enough to change it.
