The man believed to have shot and killed a New York banker in an apparently unprovoked attack on a subway train on Sunday is now behind bars.
Andrew Abdullah, 25, was arrested outside the Legal Aid Society, which said it had been trying to arrange his surrender since Monday evening. He is expected to be charged with murder in the death of Daniel Enriquez, 48, the Associated Press reported.
Enriquez was on his way to brunch Sunday morning, sitting on the last car of a Q line train bound for Manhattan from Brooklyn. Witnesses said Abdullah, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a surgical mask, was allegedly pacing back and forth in the car, as CrimeOnline previously reported. He and the victim had no contact while on the train, the witnesses said.
Without warning, the witnesses said, he pulled out a gun and shot Enriquez in the chest, then fled the train when it pulled into the Canal Street station.
The AP said he handed the gun to a stranger on the station stairs, according to Chief of Detectives James Essig. Investigators eventually found the stranger and the gun, which had been reported stolen in Virginia three years ago.
Police released surveillance photos showing the suspect and, on Tuesday morning, released Abdullah’s name and photo, asking for help finding him. The Legal Aid Society called his arrest outside their doors “completely inappropriate and unwarranted.”
“Before Andrew Abdullah could voluntarily surrender himself to the local precinct, he was needlessly ambushed out front of our Manhattan Trial Office by law enforcement, denied of his opportunity to first consult with counsel,” Legal Aid said in a statement, according to WNBC. “Since last night, we have been actively speaking with the New York Police Department and the New York County District Attorney’s Office to negotiate his surrender, and what transpired today was completely inappropriate and unwarranted given those conversations.”
The AP said court records show Abdullah has a pair of open criminal cases in New York, one an alleged vehicle theft in Brooklyn on April 24 and the other an alleged assault in Manhattan in 2020.
“This horrific crime should never have happened,” Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said at a news briefing Tuesday.
Enriquez’s sister, Griselda Vile, told Fox News that the city needed to deal with violent crime in the city better than it does.
“I’m pleading that this not happen to another New Yorker,” she said. “I don’t want my brother just to be a passing name in the media, a passing name in our normalcy post-pandemic.”
Enriquez worked in the global investment research division at Goldman Sachs. His partner, Adam Pollack, told the New York Post that Enriquez and his family lived in Brooklyn until the moved to Southern California and then Seattle. Both moves were prompted by neighborhood violence.
Enriquez returned to New York in the mid-1990s and studied at New York University. During the coronavirus pandemic, he learned to play guitar and speak Portuguese and Italian, the AP said.
The AP noted that despite a drop in shootings and murders in 2022 over last year, the city is on pace to have the second highest of homicides since 2011. But, the wire service said, the city is “substantially safer now than it was during the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s.
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[Featured image: Andrew Abdullah is escorted into the Fifth precinct on May 24, 2022, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)]
