‘It was smoke and blood and people screaming’: Witnesses describe chaos after New York attack

“My subway door opened into calamity. It was smoke and blood and people screaming,” Sam Carcamo, an eyewitness to the New York subway attack, tells radio station 1010 WINS, saying he saw a gigantic billow of smoke pouring out of the N train once the door opened.

Danny Mastrogiorgio of Brooklyn had just dropped his son off at school when he saw a crush of passengers, included multiple wounded, running up the subway stairway at the 25th Street station in panic. At least two had visible leg injuries, he says.

“It was insane,” he tells The Associated Press. “No one knew exactly what was going on.”

Allan Lee was running his business, Cafe Nube, when a half-dozen police cars and fire vehicles suddenly converged on the block.

“Then they started ushering people that were on the block to the adjacent block and then closed off the subway entrance” near the cafe’s door, he tells the AP. When he noticed bomb squad officers and dogs, he was certain it was no everyday subway problem.

Juliana Fonda, a broadcast engineer at WNYC-FM, tells its news site Gothamist that she was riding the train when passengers from the car behind hers started banging on the door between them.

“There was a lot of loud pops, and there was smoke in the other car,” she says. “And people were trying to get in and they couldn’t, they were pounding on the door to get into our car.”