Live Updates: Suspected Brooklyn Subway Gunman Is in Custody

New York City police officers on Wednesday apprehended the man who they believed opened fire on a Brooklyn subway train the previous day, officials said.

“My fellow New Yorkers: We got him,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a news conference on Wednesday afternoon. “We got him.”

The man, Frank R. James, 62, was taken into custody in the East Village, more than 30 hours after the Police Department launched a citywide search with other state and federal law enforcement agencies, Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell said.

The police stopped Mr. James after someone called in a tip saying he was at a McDonald’s in the East Village, the authorities said. Officers did not see him there but patrolled the neighborhood and located him on the street about two blocks away, near St. Marks Place.

Mr. James will be arraigned in federal court in Brooklyn on a terrorism-related charge with a maximum sentence of life in prison, said Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Officials on Wednesday morning said that Mr. James was the lone suspect in the mass shooting, in which 23 people were injured, 10 of them from gunfire, and which was the worst outbreak of subway violence in recent history.

The Police Department was working with the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to track down the man.

James Essig, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, said that detectives saw Mr. James on video entering the subway system on Tuesday morning at the Kings Highway station on the N line. Video showed him carrying a bag that was later found at the crime scene.

The police also found a key to a U-Haul van among the gunman’s belongings at the scene of the shooting and later found the van parked near the subway station where the gunman had boarded the train. They determined that Mr. James had rented the van in Philadelphia.

Footage later showed Mr. James exiting the 25th Street station, one stop away from the shooting scene, Chief Essig said. Detectives believed that he boarded an R train across the platform, rode one stop along with many of the shooting victims and panicked riders, and exited there.

He was later seen entering the 7th Avenue subway stop in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, more than a mile away from where he had exited the system, at around 9:15 a.m., Chief Essig said. Detectives were still investigating his whereabouts between his entering the subway on Tuesday and his arrest on Wednesday.

Mr. James, who has addresses in Milwaukee and Philadelphia, has posted a series of disturbing, bigoted videos online, including one where he mocked Mr. Adams’s efforts to reduce subway crime.

As law enforcement workers combed the region for Mr. James, the platform at the 36th Street subway station in the Sunset Park neighborhood in Brooklyn, where Tuesday’s bloodshed had erupted, was crowded, somber and heavily policed.

Tyreek Page, 21, a heating and cooling mechanic who had ridden one of the last trains Tuesday morning before the mayhem erupted, said he was surprised to find so many people on the platform.

“It’s weird because I wasn’t expecting to see anybody,” he said.

About 24 hours before, as a rush-hour N train approached the station, the gunman had donned a gas mask, tossed two smoke grenades on the floor, fired 33 shots and fled.

In addition to the 10 people hit by gunfire, at least 13 others suffered injuries related to smoke inhalation, falls or panic attacks, the authorities said.

The authorities asked that people share cellphone video that might help bring the manhunt to a swift conclusion and have offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the gunman.

Previous manhunts for attackers in New York City have dragged on for days, weeks or even months, though. And the Sunset Park investigation is already facing a glaring obstacle: At least one camera at the station failed to capture anything during the attack, an oversight that Mr. Adams blamed on a “malfunction.”

The shooting complicates efforts by Mr. Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul to convince people that the subways are safe, after months in which a spate of high-profile attacks on the system have hindered efforts to recover ridership that fell at the start of the pandemic and that remains more than 40 percent below prepandemic levels.

On Tuesday, subway ridership, including the Staten Island Railroad, was down by about 312,000 people from one week earlier. Though average weekday ridership has hovered at around 57 percent of pre-pandemic levels, Tuesday’s ridership was at 51.4 percent.

On Wednesday morning, Joseph Hale, a mailroom clerk, said he felt a bit uneasy about riding the subway from his home in Brooklyn to his office in Midtown Manhattan.

“I took the train like always, but was alert about who was coming on the train and how people were acting on the train,” said Mr. Hale, 40.

He said the train was as full as it usually was, but that other people were eying each other and seemed more cautious than usual.

Others said they weren’t worried. Marie Soohoo, a waitress in Midtown, said she felt safe riding the subway the day after the attack.

“Something always happens,” said Ms. Soohoo, 72. “A lot of people worry but all you can do is protect yourself.”

Jonah E. Bromwich, Emma Fitzsimmons, Jenny Gross, Rebecca Davis O’Brien and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.