A man approached a 39-year-old woman on the southbound platform of the 2 and 5 train near the Grand Concourse subway station on Friday night and asked her for directions — then grabbed her buttock and jumped onto an arriving train to escape, according to police. The incident happened around 9 p.m. NYPD is now asking the public for help identifying the suspect.
Police say the man forcibly touched the woman before fleeing on the subway, according to News12 New York. Anyone with information is asked to call the NYPD Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477). The station where the attack happened, the 149th Street–Grand Concourse complex, is a major West Bronx transfer point linking the IRT Jerome Avenue Line and the White Plains Road Line, logging more than 2 million passenger entries in 2024, per Wikipedia — the kind of high-traffic, high-turnover platform that can make a fleeing suspect especially hard to track down once he steps onto a departing train.
Subway stations along the Grand Concourse fall under NYPD Transit District 11, which is headquartered inside the 161st Street–Yankee Stadium station complex, according to the NYPD's own transit command page maintained by NYC.gov. That page provides command information but does not document a string of similar reports along the same corridor.
A Pattern Along the Grand Concourse Corridor
This is not the first time NYPD has sought a suspect accused of groping a rider near the Grand Concourse. Back in June, police issued a wanted notice after a man grabbed a 23-year-old woman's buttocks from behind at the 170th Street and Grand Concourse station before fleeing on foot, as Hoodline reported in “Bronx Cops Hunt Subway Groper After 170th St Butt-Grab.” In late August, another search unfolded after a man groped a 19-year-old passenger aboard a northbound 5 train before disappearing into the South Bronx, a case Hoodline also covered.
Citywide, transit crime complaints have stayed largely flat this year. NYPD CompStat data through late August 2026 showed 1,434 reported transit incidents year-to-date, compared to 1,436 during the same period in 2025, according to figures published by NYC.gov. That stability comes even as individual corridors like the Grand Concourse continue to see repeated forcible-touching reports.
State Funding and the Legal Stakes
In December 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul announced $77 million in state funding earmarked for maintaining high-visibility NYPD patrols across subway platforms to curb transit crime, according to the NYS Governor's Office. Whether that funding has reached the Grand Concourse corridor specifically is not addressed in available reporting.
Under New York Penal Law § 130.52, forcible touching — intentionally squeezing, grabbing, or pinching another person's intimate parts without consent — is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail and up to six years of probation, per the New York State Senate. A subsection of that same statute specifically targets non-consensual contact against passengers on subways, trains, and buses, according to Saland Law. Misdemeanor forcible touching cases carry a two-year statute of limitations under state law, according to Lebedin Kofman LLP.
The NYPD Crime Stoppers program, a privately funded initiative, offers cash rewards of up to $3,500 for confidential tips that lead to an arrest and indictment in subway sexual misconduct cases. No suspect description or surveillance images had been publicly released as of this report, and it remains unclear whether station cameras captured clear footage of the man boarding the southbound train.
