A Brooklyn woman is suing the MTA for $50 million, alleging that they could have done more to find her son, who was killed when a train hit him on the tracks near the Newkirk subway station. The victim's sister Yunette Rowe told NBC New York, "He was not searched for long enough."
On November 19, 2011, Briant Rowe was spotted on the tracks at 5:49 a.m. His family says that the NYPD's investigators told them an out-of-service train was used to search the tracks for 40 minutes and then the search ended. Rowe was killed by an oncoming 5 train at 7:33 a.m.
Rowe's mother Marva Nelson said to the Daily News, "They said they took 40 minutes to search for him, but when somebody is dead, they take six hours to close down the station. I can’t get past that. That one hurts me so much."
Her lawyer added, "A more appropriate search under the circumstances from our point of view would have been to go on foot with flashlights and to shut the system down and find this individual."
According to the Daily News, Rowe, a banker, "had been partying in Manhattan with buddies from the Omega Psi Phi fraternity before he was killed, relatives said. They insist he had no history of substance abuse or mental illness."
