Boy, 2, Is Fatally Hit by Subway Train at Busy Manhattan Station

The boy and his mother were at the Fulton Street station at around 5:30 p.m. when he somehow slipped away from her and into the path of a northbound No. 2 train, the police said. The Fire Department also responded to the station for a report of a patient “pinned by a train,” officials said.

The boy was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital in critical condition, fire officials said. He was subsequently pronounced dead, the police said.

Andy Byford, president of the New York City Transit Authority, said in a statement that the boy “apparently became separated from his mother” before being hit by the train and that “the circumstances surrounding the incident remain under investigation.”

“Our hearts break for the family,” Byford said, adding that “our thoughts are with the crew of the train as well.” He said that members of the crew had been taken to a hospital and “were totally traumatized by this incident.”

The police said that they would need to examine video footage and interview the mother and other witnesses before determining how the boy, whose name was not released, had come into contact with the train.

Service on the No. 2 and 3 lines was disrupted for some time as a result of the accident, and trains were bypassing Fulton Street on those lines in both directions as of 9 p.m., according to transit officials.

The Fulton Street station, where eight lines converge near Wall Street, was the city’s fifth-busiest station last year, with 93,000 riders passing through on an average weekday. Its platforms are often crowded around the time the accident happened, as workers flood out of financial district offices for the commute home.

It is rare for a child to be struck by a train, but the problem of people who wind up on the tracks or are hit after getting too close to a train while on a platform has been growing in recent years.

In 2017, the most recent year for which complete data was available, there were nearly 900 such incidents. As of September 2018, the system was on pace to top that number for the full year.

On Dec. 8, two women who had gotten off an A train at the Broadway Junction station in Brooklyn just after midnight fell off the edge of the platform and between cars as the same train left the station, the police said. One of the women was killed.

In 2017, 43 instances of people on tracks were believed to involve suicides or attempted suicides, subway officials said.

In September, a Bronx man was killed and his 5-year-old daughter sustained minor injuries after he jumped from a platform into the path of a moving train while holding onto the girl during the morning rush, police said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .