World

How a Manhunt Unfolded: An Alert, a Tweet, a Call From the Suspect

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look back at 31 hours when New York City was on edge — from the attack on the subway in Brooklyn to the arrest of a suspect. We’ll also see a photograph that will soon be up at the National September 11 Museum, the one image of a victim that the museum lacked.

Credit…Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times

The suspect did not go back to the van he had parked in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn and drive off, heading for some other city or some other state. He left clues behind, whether he intended to or not — the key to the van, which the police could trace, and bank cards that carried a name. And a gun that was quickly traced to a purchase a decade ago in Ohio. The purchaser was a man named Frank Robert James.

That was the name on the bank cards. He was 62 and recently had been staying in Philadelphia.

But as the police mobilized to find him, he simply disappeared into the city.

The manhunt that followed had an immediacy that was unique to this moment. It was difficult to remember a manhunt where bystanders pointed the police to a suspect, with one photographing the man and posting on Twitter. “Hooray for bystanders who helped,” one commenter wrote on nytimes.com after reading our story about the manhunt.

Like Mayor Eric Adams, who deplored the “crisis that is playing across our country” involving guns and violence, some commenters mentioned access to guns. “We just don’t understand all the guns everywhere,” someone from Australia wrote. “I’ve loved the traveling I’ve done in the U.S. in the past but I’m not sure I’d return now — all I read is anger and guns.”

The subway attack unfolded as New York wrestled with questions about public safety above ground as well as on its labyrinthine transit system. But it began unremarkably: Someone who looked like a construction worker — a man wearing a hard hat and a reflective safety jacket and clutching a backpack — walked into a subway station. When he swiped his MetroCard at a turnstile and it did not let him pass, the agent at a nearby booth pushed a button, unlocking an emergency exit door. The man stepped through. It was 6:12 a.m. at the Kings Highway station in Brooklyn.

At some point he boarded an N train that arrived at 59th Street, a half dozen stops away, around 8:20. Once the train was moving again, he stood and pulled on a gas mask. He took a canister from a bag he was carrying. “Oops,” he said, according to a rider standing nearby. “My bad.”

As the car began filling with smoke from the canister, he took out a handgun and opened fire.

At the next stop, at the 36th Street station, those who could — those who had not been wounded — poured out. The gunman apparently fled with them, boarding the R across the platform and riding the same train as people he had just shot.

The police soon called him a “person of interest” and, by the next morning, a suspect.

When an alert went out on smartphones, a 17-year-old boy on a school field trip in Chinatown noticed a heavyset man sitting on a bench. The teenager, Jack Griffin, said the man on the bench looked like the man he had seen in pictures. He photographed him and posted on Twitter at 10:29 a.m. After about 30 minutes, he said later, he also dialed Crime Stoppers.

The police called back a couple of hours later, asking where he had seen the man.

Another call also got their attention. The caller said his name was Frank James, and he was the man they were looking for.


Weather

Prepare for a chance of rain, with late-afternoon wind and temps in the 50s. The rain and wind will continue into the evening as temps drop to the low 40s.

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A last photo finds its place

Antonio Dorsey Pratt, left, in the last photo for the wall of 9/11 victims at the National September 11 Museum.Credit…Via Jordan Freeman

Soon the wall of photographs at the National September 11 Memorial Museum on the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan will be complete. The single missing image has been tracked down.

It shows Antonio Dorsey Pratt, who worked for Forte Food Service and was assigned to the cafeteria at Cantor Fitzgerald when the first plane crashed into the north tower on Sept. 11, 2001. He was one of the 2,753 people killed at the trade center that day.

Over the years the museum had assembled photos of all but a few of the victims. In 2016, when there were seven left to find, The New York Times published an article that led officials from the Department of Homeland Security to turn over five photographs from the agency’s files. Last month, New York Today covered the discovery of one of the remaining two, a photograph of Albert Ogletree, who also worked in the Cantor Fitzgerald cafeteria.

It turned out that the image of Pratt had been located in 2020 and forwarded to another organization — Voices Center for Resilience, which had started a digital archive project in 2006 and had amassed nearly 90,000 photographs of the people killed at the trade center in 2001, along with the six victims (and the unborn child one of them was carrying) who died in a bombing there in 1993.

Voices posted the picture of Pratt on its website, but the find went unnoticed when the museum was shut down early in the pandemic and later, when the staff was preoccupied with preparing for the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks.

Mary Fetchet, a co-founder of Voices and its executive director, said the group had heard from Jordan Freeman, who had been the director of vocational services for a Brooklyn-based housing and social services agency in the 1990s.

“I remembered that I had a photo of him,” Freeman said, “but I didn’t know where.”

Going through items stashed in a linen closet, he opened a shoebox and saw photographs from the 1990s. One showed Pratt working as a supervisor at a snack shop the agency ran.

“He was a class act,” Freeman said. “Very smart, very motivated, very caring, friendly, compassionate. One of the reasons we promoted him to be in a supervisory capacity was he worked well with other clients in the program.”

He scanned the photograph and sent it to Voices last fall. After the article appeared in New York Today, Voices obtained a release from Jordan giving Voices permission to turn the original print over to the museum, and Fetchet delivered it to Alice Greenwald, the museum’s president and chief executive.

Jan Seidler Ramirez, an executive vice president of the museum and its chief curator, said the original would be copied for mounting on the wall. She said that when museum officials saw the photograph on the Voices website, they were struck by Pratt’s warmth.

“There he was, smiling,” Ramirez said. “We all thought, what a way to conclude this long search.”


What we’re reading

  • A documentary series uses new material and archival footage to expand on a three-part, 20,000-word investigation published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019.

  • It’s not an easy time to find an apartment to rent in New York City. If you landed a new home recently, tell us your story.


METROPOLITAN diary

Perfect choice

Dear Diary:

A well-dressed older woman carrying a faux-alligator cat carrier walked into the Best Friends Lifesaving Center in SoHo recently asking to meet two specific black cats.

She filled out a form and washed her hands, and I brought her in to meet the cats. She decided on the female, and we sat down to do the necessary paperwork.

I asked if she had a general preference for black cats.

She looked me up and down.

“No, dear,” she said. “l don’t have a preference. I just live in New York City. I wear black every day.”

— Diane Mancher

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.


Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Olivia Parker and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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