A 26-year-old Bronx man who spent his days caring for his disabled father and working security shifts was shot dead on a Manhattan subway platform Saturday, and his killer remains free.
Darrel Rodriguez was fatally shot in the chest around 12:20 p.m. at the 53rd Street/7th Avenue station. Police say a masked gunman in a red tracksuit, black vest and facial covering opened fire after an argument with Rodriguez on the platform, then fled. He died on the northbound E train platform.
No arrests have been made as of Tuesday night. Police have no video from the platform and have not identified the shooter, whose face was covered.
Rodriguez lived with his father, Tony, who suffered a stroke and now struggles to speak. His aunt, Ana Pichardo, 61, said her nephew devoted himself to two things: the gym and work.
“He was mainly with his father. He was crazy about his father,” Pichardo said. “He even got jealous when his father got a girlfriend. They’re very close.”
Rodriguez had set up a home gym in his bedroom a few months ago, installing a weight bar. His father joked about it in Spanish, translated by Pichardo: “Heavy weights, right?” Tony said his son also loved playing rock and roll on guitar and enjoyed singing.
Pichardo said the family has never seen the suspect before and that her nephew didn’t have much time for friends outside his father and work. “I think he was waiting for somebody. Chasing somebody,” she speculated about the gunman.
A longtime neighbor, identified only as Maddy, 46, who has known Rodriguez since he was a baby, described him as “a quiet, decent young man” who “didn’t look for problems with nobody.” She said his killer “had to be a stranger,” since “everybody on the block loves him.”
Inside the family’s Bronx home, Rodriguez had written his own thoughts on a piece of paper clipped to a black clipboard. It read, in part: “I had a hard path, I had no one.”
“What is stopping you is you,” Rodriguez had written. “Your ineffectiveness to show up for yourself. Always show up for yourself. Also, that’s the last person to show up for. Show up for yourself. The best person to show up for. Always show up for yourself.”
Rodriguez worked the front desk as a security guard at a Manhattan building, though the exact location was not immediately clear. At the bottom of his handwritten note, he had written one more line: “Need to find a new job.”
