Yaw Boahene was stepping off a northbound A train at the Utica Avenue station in Brooklyn around 5:50 p.m. Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, when the doors closed on his bag. The train pulled out of the station with the bag still caught. The 57-year-old commuter was dragged, then fell between the cars and onto the tracks, police said.
Emergency Service Unit officers, emergency medical technicians and New York Police Department personnel converged on the A and C line station. Boahene was found unconscious and unresponsive, and first responders pronounced him dead at the scene. Sneakers were left behind where the train struck him.
Investigators initially said a backpack had been trapped in the doors, but police later clarified that the item was a blue plastic bag. No criminality is suspected, the NYPD said.
Screams Inside the Car
Riders aboard the train realized something had gone wrong only as the cars kept rolling. One woman who was on board told ABC 7 New York that she lost sight of the man, heard noises she could not place, and then heard passengers inside the car and people on the platform begin to scream. She described the experience as super traumatic and said she did not believe the conductor noticed anything at first.
“His bag got caught in the door and the train just kept moving,” she said. She added that she dialed 911 herself because no Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) staff were at the station.
Questions About the Doors
The MTA called the death a “terrible accident” in a statement, but the agency did not say whether any security mechanisms might have prevented it.
A 35-year-old man who lives near the station said he was getting off an A train on the opposite side of the platform when he saw police officers and firefighters rushing down the stairs. He put the blame on the train’s conductor, telling The Post that a crew should be aware when its doors have not fully closed.
Boahene was exiting a northbound A train when the closing doors caught his bag, and he was struck by the train as it pulled away, police officials said. A police spokesperson said the investigation remains ongoing.
Earlier Cases of Caught Doors
The mechanics of Monday’s death are not new to the system. In 2022, a commuter at the Columbus Circle station in Manhattan died after clothing or bags became caught in the closing doors of a train car.
Other riders have survived similar ordeals. In 2003, a grandmother suffered a dislocated right arm after her arm was caught in a door and she was dragged several feet along the platform by a Manhattan subway train, the New York Daily News reported at the time. Two years earlier, in 2001, a 12-year-old girl was hauled some 20 feet across a platform when her ankle became trapped in a subway door, slamming her head into a metal pillar while her mother and sister watched. The sixth-grader was freed just before the train left the station and escaped serious injury.
A Grim Stretch Underground
Boahene’s death lands in a punishing period for the transit system. Earlier in September 2026, two young New Yorkers were killed by a speeding train as they sat on the tracks at the Canal Street station in lower Manhattan, run over by a No. 4 train.
In June 2026, a 47-year-old nurse was randomly shoved into the side of an oncoming train in the Bronx, leaving him with a bloody concussion.
What set Monday’s case apart was how ordinary the moment was: a rider carrying a bag, a door sliding shut, a train leaving a station on schedule. Police have not deemed the incident criminal, and the inquiry into how a plastic bag caught in a closing door ended in a death on the tracks continues.