A 17-year-old boy was arrested on Thursday, October 22 in New York on charges of killing Darrel Rodriguez, a 26-year-old Bronx security guard, during a quarrel in Manhattan Metro. The young man, identified as Xavian Collins, surrendered to the police accompanied by his lawyer, five days after the murder. He’s accused of murder and illegal possession of weapons. A judge ordered him to stay in jail without bail.
The murder took place on Saturday 17 October, just after noon, at Seventh Avenue–53rd Street station, a few hundred meters from Times Square. Rodriguez was on the E-line counter in the north direction when he had a diverb with a young man wearing a red suit, a black jacket and a mask on his face. According to the police reconstruction, the discussion continued inside a car just arrived at the station, and then moved back to the dock. At that point, the attacker pulled a gun and hit Rodriguez in the chest with a bullet before fleeing Seventh Avenue.
Investigators believe that there may be a marijuana cigarette at the origin of the fight. According to ABC7 New York, Collins would smoke inside the car and Rodriguez would face it to ask him to stop. This reconstruction remains an investigative hypothesis. The police acquired video surveillance images that document part of the clash and recovered in the wagon a casing of a 9mm caliber gun.
Rodriguez was rescued by paramedics and transported in critical condition to Bellevue Hospital, where he died shortly after. The attack took place in the middle of the day, while in the station there were numerous passengers. In the following days the police released images of the alleged responsible and intensified controls at Midtown stations. Collins showed up at the Midtown North Commissioner around 12:25 on Thursday, accompanied by his attorney. According to CBS New York, the boy had no prior arrests.
During the Thursday afternoon hearing, Collins was formally incriminated and subjected to custody without bail. His lawyer, Michael D. Horn, challenged the charges, claiming that the evidence so far examined does not show that his assistant is the author of the shot. Horn said he was convinced that Collins will be exonerated. The next hearing is scheduled for 30 October. The assessment of criminal liability shall take place during the proceedings.
Darrel Rodriguez lived in the University Heights neighborhood, in the Bronx, where he grew up with his twin brother Derick. He worked as a security officer and, according to the people who knew him, spent a lot of time on his father, who had health problems. The brother, who moved to Texas after enlisting in the army in 2021, told the New York Times how difficult it was to face the loss of a person with whom he shared his whole life. He described pain as something deeper than mourning, comparing it to the loss of a part of himself.
Rodriguez’s murder is the seventh recorded since the beginning of the year in the New York Metro. In the same period of 2025 there were four, while in 2024, a particularly violent year for the subway, there were ten in the entire year. According to the police data, analyzed by Gothamist, on 18 October the people affected by firearms in the transport system were five, against two in the same period of the previous year. Even the attacks classified as serious offences increased, from 480 to 535.
The overall trend of crime in the transport network is however less marked. According to the CompStat statistics of the NYPD, from the beginning of 2026 to 18 October 1,737 serious crimes had been recorded, against 1,708 of the same period of 2025: an increase of 1.7 percent. The figure includes several categories, including murders, robberies, serious assaults and thefts. Over the longer period, the total number of these crimes remains slightly lower than the levels of 2022, but violent aggression continues to be a specific problem.
The difference is even more evident by comparing these numbers to those of the entire city. In the first nine months of 2026, according to the report published by NYPD on October 6, New York recorded 203 murders, against 253 in the same period of 2025, and a reduction of 1.6 percent of the episodes with firearms. They were the lowest values ever recorded by the police for the first nine months of the year. The general reduction of violence has therefore not had the same trend in all parts of the city, and in particular in the metro system.
After Rodriguez’s death, Mayor Zohran Mamdani acknowledged that, despite the progress of recent years, passenger safety remains a problem to face. Some commuters have asked for more controls and restrictions on the use of masks that prevent the identification of the face in stations. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has reiterated its support for measures against the port of arms on public transport. The discussion concerns above all how to prevent aggression that can turn a quarrel between strangers into a deadly episode, even in the hours of greater affluence and in the most frequented stations of the city.
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