Images captured by people at the scene of the Brooklyn subway shooting and witness accounts piece together a picture of the panic and chaos that ensued when shots began to ring out in the smoke-filled train car.
People backed away from the door and a man banged on the door trying to move into the subway car, video taken by the passenger showed. In another video, people can be seen rushing off the subway train after it pulled into the 36th Street subway station.
Smoke pours out of the car where the shooting took place, and people can be heard screaming, that video shows. Someone helps an injured and bleeding person off the train, and another man is seen hobbling off the train shortly afterward.
Images taken by others at the scene show the subway platform streaked with blood and people sitting and lying on the train platform following the attack.
Hourari Benkada, 27, was sitting next to the subway shooting suspect on the “N” train and was shot in the back of his knee while trying to flee, he told CNN.
“I feel shocked, I feel shaky, I don’t know if I can ever ride a train,” Benkada, a lifelong New Yorker, said after coming out of surgery.
Benkada, a housekeeping manager at the New Yorker Hotel, got on the last car of the N train and sat next to a man with a duffel bag who was wearing an Metropolitan Transportation Authority vest, he said. The gunman then let off a “smoke bomb” and started shooting about 20 seconds after the train took off, Benkada said.
Benkada was focused on helping a pregnant woman, whom he feared would get hurt as people rushed to the front of the car, when he got shot, describing it as “the worst pain of my entire life.”
The bullet hit him in the back of his knee and came out the other side, he said. Doctors told him the bullet grazed his kneecap. He is expected to walk on his own after several weeks on crutches.
Benkada heard other people in pain but couldn’t see them or the suspect because of the smoke, he said.
Claire Tunkel, 46, took off her jacket and tied it around the leg of a man who suffered a gunshot wound, she told CNN. Tunkel, who went to the hospital for smoke inhalation, said several victims were lying on the floor of the subway platform after the train arrived at the station.
“One of the guys who was shot, his leg was bleeding pretty bad, so I took off my jacket and tied it around his leg,” she said.
Tunkel was in the subway car where the shooting took place and described the scene as chaotic. While she couldn’t see anything because of the smoke, she said she heard people crying out for help and others who said they were bleeding.
“You couldn’t see anything, but you could feel it,” she said. People were rushing to the front of the car, and some fell to the ground, she noted. “You could feel the bodies.”