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NYC subway shooter’s attorney asks for leniency ahead of sentencing
By
Samantha Max
Published Sep 19, 2023
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By
Samantha Max
Published Sep 19, 2023
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An attorney for the man who admitted to firing into a crowded Brooklyn subway train in 2022, injuring 10 people and inciting panic during the rush hour commute, is asking for leniency ahead of his sentencing next week.
Frank Robert James, 64, pleaded guilty to all 11 charges against him earlier this year, including committing a terrorist act on a mass transit system and discharging a firearm while committing a violent crime.
Federal prosecutors have previously asked for a sentence of 32 to 37 years. James’ attorney, Mia Eisner-Grynberg, requested a prison term of 18 years — a sentence she said her client is unlikely to survive, due to his age, health and the shorter life expectancy of people behind bars.
“Mr. James is not evil. He is very, very ill,” Eisner-Grynberg wrote in a memo filed this week. “A just sentence in this case tempers the natural urge for retribution with mercy.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment on the defense's request.
On April 12, 2022, James set off smoke bombs and fired 32 bullets from a Glock 17 pistol on a packed N train passing through Sunset Park, the memo states. Graphic videos of the shooting’s aftermath that circulated on social media showed passengers rushing off the train and bloody victims collapsing onto the platform. Prosecutors said he had been planning the attack for years.
At least one victim has sued Glock, alleging that the gun James used in the shooting caused serious injuries. The incident also stoked fears about subway safety as many New Yorkers were weighing whether to return to mass transit after the COVID-19 pandemic.
James has admitted in court that he knew firing into an enclosed subway car could have killed people, and his attorney wrote that her client acted with “extreme and depraved indifference to human life.” But she said his actions were the culmination of childhood abuse, decades of severe mental illness and homelessness, and many failed attempts to get help.
“He returned to the city that raised him, and, for 30 years, harmed him directly and through its agents’ negligent failure to act,” Eisner-Grynberg wrote. “Out of control, and very sick, Mr. James cried out in a way that he knew, this time, would be heard.”
A history of mental illness
James grew up in the Bronx in the 1960s and '70s as part of a grief-stricken family predisposed to mental illness, according to the pre-sentencing memo. Before James was born, his older brother fell off a roof and died. His mother was depressed and sick with cancer by the time James was born. She was unable to nurture her son as a young child and died when James was 6 years old, the memo states.
After his mother’s death, James was raised by his father, who his attorney said was addicted to alcohol and physically abusive. James went to a psychiatric hospital for the first time when he was 15 years old and started receiving weekly shots of a sedative called Thorazine, which James’ attorney said did not solve his mental health problems.
Eisner-Grynberg writes that when James was 18, a train conductor beat him on the head with a stick to subdue him because he was acting erratically. He tried to attend college but was hospitalized again and discharged after two weeks without a treatment plan.
He then went home to New York, where he started hearing voices that he believed were speaking to him through a local radio station, the memo states. James set the station on fire, hoping to make the voices stop. While on Rikers Island after the incident, according to the memo, James attempted suicide.
James was eventually released, but the decades that followed were punctuated with bouts of stability surrounded mostly by extended periods of paranoia, alcoholism and homelessness, according to his attorney. He went to trade school and worked as a machinist but was fired from multiple jobs.
In 1993, according to the memo, James was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. He spent years cycling through clinics, hospitals and homeless shelters across the country. James’ attorney writes that her client became consumed by conspiracy theories over time.
“He retreated fully inward, isolating himself to the point where his only human interaction was via YouTube,” Eisner-Grynberg writes. “In all of his videos, he is paranoid, drunk and plainly unwell.”
Before the shooting, James posted videos on YouTube describing his travails in New York City’s mental health system and saying that he wanted to “watch people die.” He also criticized Mayor Eric Adams, who he said should be doing more to address homelessness on the subways.
Adams has since ramped up his response to the homelessness crisis underground, sparking criticism from some mental health and civil liberties advocates.
Request for leniency
James’ attorney asked the judge presiding over the case to impose a sentence that will allow her client to get the mental health care that he needs. He currently sees a therapist about once a month but is not receiving psych medications, according to Eisner-Grynberg.
James’ attorney said her client feels “significant and genuine remorse for the harm he caused,” in addition to gratitude that no one died. But Eisner-Grynberg urged the judge to think about all the people and systems that failed James before deciding on a sentence.
“Mr. James brought horror to his victims and the city at large. His actions will be carried in their mental and physical scars and in all our city forever,” she wrote. “But his story began long before that day.”
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Samantha Max
Samantha reports on whether New Yorkers feel safe and whether the institutions that are supposed to protect them are working. Before coming to WNYC/Gothamist, she spent three years covering the criminal justice system in Tennessee for Nashville Public Radio. Her reporting on Nashville's police department received multiple awards, including the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. Samantha was also part of the inaugural class of Report for America, a service journalism program that sends up-and-coming reporters to local newsrooms across the country. She is a Northwestern University grad, a Baltimore native and fluent in Spanish. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal: samanthamaxwnyc.93.
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