News
Travel
Entertainment
Business
Lifestyle
University
Events
Blavity News is a community and platform for Black Voices, Stories, Creators and thought.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the freshest stories in your inbox, every day!

I agree to the terms and privacy policies.

News

Politics

Culture

Lifestyle

Social Justice

Blavity X Identity Digital

Blavity x Mastercard

Creators 100

Op-Eds

Black History Month

Write a Story

My Account

Privacy Policies

Terms & Conditions

Partner With Us

Careers

Shop

Blavity is a community of the most exceptional multi-cultural creators and influencers in the world. We partner with diverse content creators and influencers to help them reach a wider audience, amplify their message, and fund their hustles. We believe that the world shifts according to the way people see it— and if you change the way people view the world, you can transform it. A subsidiary of Blavity, Inc.

© Blavity, Inc., 2023
Sign Up

Blavity News is a community and platform for Black Voices, Stories, Creators and thought.
© Blavity, Inc., 2023

'They F**king Made Me Worse': Suspect in Brooklyn Subway Shooting Bashed NYC Mayor For Not Helping People With Mental Illness

"These are the people that was supposed to be helping me," the suspect said.

April 13, 2022 at 6:59 pm

A masked man tossed two smoke canisters and then proceeded to open fire on the N subway train while it was approaching the 36th Street Station in Brooklyn on Tuesday. Ten people were shot and at least 23 were injured, The New York Times reports.

Police identified Frank James, 62, as a suspect in the mass shooting, The New York Times reports.

Prior to the shooting, James recorded a video message directed at New York Mayor Eric Adams. He said he went through New York’s mental health system and endured a level of emotional violence that would compel someone to “go and get a gun and shoot motherf**kers,” the Daily Beast reports.

Frank R. James is wanted by the NYPD as a person of interest in the mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway that wounded 10 people. The 63-year-old has ties to Wisconsin and Philadelphia. The shooting suspect remains at large, police say: https://t.co/67uuymrjyO pic.twitter.com/60ruPaAH0V

— Heavy.com (@HeavySan) April 12, 2022

He also criticized Adams for not assembling a team that helps the homeless and the mentally ill.

“These are the people that was supposed to be helping me,” James said while pointing at the screen of people in a video uploaded to his YouTube page, according to Newsweek. “They made me worse! They f**king made me worse. They made me more dangerous than anybody could ever f**king imagine.”

James added that he was a mental health patient at one of New York’s Behavioral Health clinics, but he said his treatments made his problems worse.

“When I went there I was a nice person, I wanted to help people. When I left out there I wanted to kill everything in sight. I was planning to kill everything I saw, based on how I was treated by these b***hes,” he said.

During one of the videos, James also bashed Adams’ plan on ending gun violence and said it’s “doomed to fail.”

“Because I see some serious flaws in his plan,” he said, according to the Daily Beast. “I don’t know about some of it. I know part of it is definitely flawed and it’s doomed to failure.”

James also addressed the mental health part of the mayor’s plan.

“I’m also an expert on that, because — not only am I an expert, but I’m also a f**king patient. A mental health patient as well,” he said.

“I have been in crisis, as a patient. I have a diagnosis that goes back to 1980, and I have been in crisis. I have acted out, so to speak, to the point where I had to be locked up because I was using illegal narcotics, I’ll just say,” he added. “I made up my mind, kind of told myself, you know, I may have to hurt somebody one day, somebody may have to get hurt.”