Federal prosecutors said that Frank James had access to an alleged stockpile of ammunition in a storage unit. The suspected shooter didn’t speak in court, and was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. NBC New York’s Myles Miller reports.
The 62-year-old man accused of shooting 10 people and injuring more than a dozen others committed a "premeditated" rush-hour transit attack that triggered the worst commute disruption the city has seen in 20 years, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
Suspect Frank James, wearing a beige prison uniform, nodded when a judge asked him if he understood the federal charge against him. He waived his rights to a preliminary hearing and was ordered detained at his arraignment in Brooklyn federal court Thursday. James did not speak beyond that, and has been ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
"The defendant’s attack was entirely premeditated. The day before the shooting,
the defendant picked up a U-Haul in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which he drove over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and into Brooklyn in the early morning hours of April 12," prosecutors said in the detention memo. "The defendant came to Brooklyn prepared with all of the weapons and tools he needed to carry out the mass attack."
Those items, according to court papers, included a Glock 17 pistol bought by the suspect, a container with gasoline, a torch and fireworks with explosive powder. All were later found on the platform at the 36th Street and Fourth Avenue subway station.
James allegedly disguised himself during the attack and tossed the costume during the chaos that followed in order to flee the subway station undetected, prosecutors said. He was traveling the trains after the attack with a second MetroCard — different from the one he used just before the Brooklyn attack — that investigators didn't know he had, according to a senior law enforcement official. That second card is the reason police lost track of his movements until his arrest.
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James also had a second phone, the other was recovered at the crime scene, and authorities on Thursday are working to get into the device. Investigators did not previously know about the second phone, otherwise they would have tried to use its signal to track him.
Law enforcement officers recovered a stockpile of weapons and ammunition from other locations allegedly controlled by James, prosecutors said. They found an empty magazine for a Glock handgun, a taser, a high-capacity rifle magazine, and a blue smoke canister in the apartment where he stayed before traveling to Brooklyn. They also found a propane tank, pillow and chair in the U-Haul linked to the scene. The propane was being used with a heater, according to a senior law enforcement official.
From James' storage unit, investigators recovered 9mm ammunition, a threaded 9mm pistol barrel that allows for a silencer or suppresser to be attached, targets, and .223 caliber ammunition, used with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
As for the gun he had on the subway to allegedly carry out the attack, investigators said he had three magazines that held 30 rounds each — up to 90 bullets in all. Some officials also said they think one smoke grenade might have accidentally been set off prematurely on that train, prompting James to allegedly begin shooting.
Read the full detention memo below.
While prosecutors described James in court papers as a calculating shooter who fired "in cold blood at terrified passengers who had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide," his defense cautioned against a rush to judgment, as attorney Mia Eisner-Grynberg noted he was the one to call Crime Stoppers and report his own location. Even if he didn't, a senior law enforcement official says police were already working off a Twitter report of a sighting in the Lower East Side, and were swarming the area looking for him.
James' lawyers agreed Thursday to his being jailed, but said they could seek bail later.
No follow-up court date was immediately set.
With the suspected shooter behind bars, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies are turning their attention to motive as they comb through details of the 62-year-old Black man’s life.
An erratic work history. Arrests for a string of mostly low-level crimes. A storage locker with more ammo. And hours of rambling, bigoted, profanity-laced videos on his YouTube channel that point to a deep, simmering anger.
James posted dozens of videos ranting about race, violence and his struggles with mental illness. One stands out for its relative calm: A silent shot of a packed New York City subway car in which he raises his finger to point out passengers, one by one.
"This nation was born in violence, it’s kept alive by violence or the threat thereof, and it’s going to die a violent death," says James in a video where he takes on the moniker "Prophet of Doom."
After a 30-hour manhunt, James was arrested without incident after a tipster — which turned out to be James himself — said he could be found near a McDonald’s on Manhattan’s East Village. Mayor Eric Adams triumphantly proclaimed "We got him!" after the arrest.
Police said their top priority was getting the suspect, who has since been charged, off the streets as they investigate their biggest unanswered question: Why?
A prime trove of evidence, they said, is his YouTube videos. He seems to have opinions about nearly everything — racism in America, New York City’s new mayor, the state of mental health services, 9/11, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Black women.
A federal criminal complaint cited one in which James ranted about too many homeless people on the subway and put the blame on New York City’s mayor.
"What are you doing, brother?" he said in the video posted March 27. "Every car I went to was loaded with homeless people. It was so bad, I couldn’t even stand."
James then railed about the treatment of Black people in an April 6 video cited in the complaint, saying, "And so the message to me is: I should have gotten a gun, and just started shooting."
In a video posted a day before the attack, James criticizes crime against Black people and says things would only change if certain people were "stomped, kicked and tortured" out of their "comfort zone."
Surveillance cameras spotted James entering the subway system turnstiles Tuesday morning, dressed as a maintenance or construction worker in a yellow hard hat and orange working jacket with reflective tape.
Police say fellow riders heard him say only “oops” as he set off one smoke grenade in a crowded subway car as it rolled into a station. He then set off a second smoke grenade and started firing, police said. In the smoke and chaos that ensued, police say James made his getaway by slipping into a R-train going the opposite direction and exited after the first stop.
Left behind at the scene was the gun – which a senior law enforcement official confirmed was jammed after 33 shots were fired – extended magazines, a hatchet, detonated and undetonated smoke grenades, a black garbage can, a rolling cart, gasoline and the key to a U-Haul van, police said.
That key led investigators to James, and clues to a life of setbacks and anger as he bounced among factory and maintenance jobs, got fired at least twice, moved among Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York.
Investigators said James had 12 prior arrests in New York and New Jersey from 1990 to 2007. The nine prior NYC arrests from 1992 to 1998 include possession of burglary, criminal sex act, and theft of service.
In New Jersey, James has three other arrests in 1991, 1992, and 2007, including for trespass, larceny, and disorderly conduct, police said during Wednesday's press conference.
James had no felony convictions and was not prohibited from purchasing or owning a firearm. Police said the gun used in the attack was legally purchased at an Ohio pawn shop in 2011. A close up image of that gun he purchased showed that he tried to obliterate the serial number on it, investigators said. But agents used that number to trace the purchase back to him.
A search of James' Philadelphia storage unit and apartment turned up at least two types of ammunition, including the kind used with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, a taser and a blue smoke cannister.
Police said James was born and raised in New York City. In his videos, he said he finished a machine shop course in 1983 then worked as a gear machinist at Curtiss-Wright, an aerospace manufacturer in New Jersey, until 1991 when he was he was hit by a one-two punch of bad news: He was fired from his job and, soon after, his father whom he had lived with in New Jersey died.
Records show James filed a complaint against the aerospace company in federal court soon after he lost his job alleging racial discrimination, but it was dismissed a year later by a judge. He says in one video, without offering specifics, that he "couldn’t get any justice for what I went through."
A spokesperson for Curtiss-Wright didn’t immediately respond to a call seeking comment.
James describes going in and out of several mental health facilities, including two in the Bronx in the 1970s.
"Mr. Mayor, let me say to you I’m a victim of your mental health program in New York City," James says in a video earlier this year, adding he is "full of hate, full anger and bitterness."
James says he later was a patient at Bridgeway House, a mental health facility in New Jersey, although that could not be immediately confirmed. Messages left with the facility were not returned.
"My goal at Bridgeway in 1997 was to get off Social Security and go back to f------ work," he says in a video, adding that he enrolled in a college and took a course in computer-aided design and manufacturing.
James says he eventually got a job at telecommunications giant Lucent Technologies in Parsippany, New Jersey, but says he ended up getting fired and returned to Bridgeway House, this time not as a patient but as an employee on the maintenance staff. A message seeking comment was sent to Lucent Technologies.
"I just want to work. I want to be a person that’s productive," he said.
Touches of that earnest, struggling man showed up after James’ parked car was hit in Milwaukee. Eugene Yarbrough, pastor of Mt. Zion Wings of Glory Church of God in Christ next door to James’ apartment, said James was impressed that the pastor owned up to hitting the car. Neither James nor anyone else was there to see the accident. And James called him up to say so.
"I just couldn’t believe it would be him," Yarbrough said. "But who knows what people will do?"
Police and federal agents said that James has had no steady job or fixed address for the past few years. After renting the U-Haul van Monday afternoon in Philadelphia, using his own name, he apparently slept in it — as police later removed bedding, pillows and chairs in the hours after the shooting.
