The New York Police Department released photos on Tuesday evening of a man that is being sought in connection with a mass shooting attack that was carried out on the city’s subway earlier in the day, leaving more than two dozen shot or injured.
“Police identified [the suspect], 62, of Philadelphia as a person of interest in the case,” CBS News reported. “They say [the suspect] rented a U-Haul van that might be connected to the shooting.”
“We are endeavoring to locate him to determine his connection to the subway shooting, if any,” NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said.
Videos from the attack on the subway showed that the air was filled with smoke from smoke bombs that had been detonated. The suspect fired dozens of rounds during the attack, hitting at least 10 people. Another approximately 19 people were injured from the chaos that ensued from the attack.
The Daily Wire normally withholds the names and faces of suspects in mass shooting attacks and other terrorist attacks due to company policy. However, The Daily Wire does publish names and faces of persons of interest and suspects who are at-large in an effort to assist law enforcement in locating the suspect.
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro explained the company policy following the Parkland massacre in 2018, writing in-part:
Studies suggest that media coverage of mass shootings can have a significant impact on the psyches of potential mass shooters — that such potential mass shooters have a cognitive craving for attention, which they know they will receive for committing atrocities.
As Professor Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy of Western New Mexico University found in a paper presented to the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in 2016, “media contagion” can help make mass shootings more common. “Unfortunately,” said Johnston, “we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame.” The rise of such a trait in mass shooters, she claimed, rose “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hours news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period.” Johnston recommended a media pact to “no longer share, reproduce, or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers,” predicting that if the media did so, “we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years.” While other studies do not make such a dramatic statistic prediction, they do support similar conclusions.
We at The Daily Wire would like to do our part. We will still report the backgrounds of mass shooters, biographical details, the type of weapons used in such shootings, how such weapons were obtained, and other details that could make a difference in the public debate with regard to policymaking. But we will not contribute to the unintentional glorification of shooters themselves by giving their names and faces airtime. Instead, we will continue to focus on the victims of such awful attacks, and the heroes who all too often must give of themselves to stop them.
This is a developing news story; refresh the page for updates.