Raymond Chiodini got on the R train in Brooklyn on Tuesday morning around 8 a.m. to get to his job as a courier for the Department of Education in Manhattan. Six stops and 30 minutes later, as the train slowed to pull into the 36th Street station, he could hear muffled screams through the closed trains doors — and then, when they opened, he saw the platform covered in blood, obscured by smoke, and filled with injured passengers who survived the mass shooting that wounded ten people and injured at least a dozen more.
“I was panicking along with everybody else,” Chiodini, 28, said Tuesday evening. Chiodini rushed out of the car and approached a bleeding man, grabbed him by his hoodie, and dragged him into the open car to get him out of the mad rush. In the process, Chiodini got some of the man’s blood on the camera he carries with him for his other job as a freelance photographer.
Five minutes, ten minutes — the length of time he spent down on the platform was a blur, Chiodini said. There was a woman, three months pregnant, walking around with only one shoe. Many people appeared to be shot in the leg. “A surprising amount of the victims were up and awake and cognizant and talking or screaming — or in agony,” he said.
Chiodini’s pictures, taken in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, give the clearest view into the carnage that spilled below Sunset Park. Not only did he capture the spent casings and weapons that were of immediate interest to the police and the FBI, he also caught the grief and confusion of the commuters whose morning — if not their whole lives — were shattered by a random encounter with a lone gunman who, for no clear reason, unleashed 33 rounds inside the packed rush-hour train.
A wounded man makes a phone call while another man, shot in the leg, is given first aid.
The blood-slicked floor of the car that was attacked.
An officer helps a survivor.
A bullet hole inside the car.
Firefighters rush into the station after two smoke grenades were detonated.
A wounded man makes a phone call while another man, shot in the leg, is given first aid.
The blood-slicked floor of the car that was attacked.
An officer helps a survivor.
A bullet hole inside the car.
Firefighters rush into the station after two smoke grenades were detonated.
Soon, paramedics and police brought everybody out of the subway, and Chiodini spent the next seven or so hours at the 72nd precinct, just a few blocks up from the station, talking with police and federal agents about the shooting. “I’m exhausted,” he said. “It sucks, brother. It sucks so much. I’m gonna wake up tomorrow and be very hesitant to get on that train in all honesty, you know what I mean?”
