A man was charged late Tuesday in the fatal shoving of a subway rider in the Bronx after he was taken into custody earlier in the day in a separate assault at a Manhattan subway station this month, the police said.
The man, Kevin Darden, 34, was arrested on a murder charge in the death of the rider, Wai Kuen Kwok, 61, who was shoved into the path of an oncoming subway train on Sunday, the police said. Mr. Darden, who was located in the Bronx near his last known address, was believed to appear in surveillance video leaving the scene of the killing.
During the three-day manhunt, the victim of an earlier shoving episode, a 51-year-old man pushed to the platform of the West Fourth Street subway station on Nov. 6, told the police that he had been attacked by the same man who appeared in the video from Sunday.
“You shouldn’t walk in front of me,” the assailant told the man, according to the police, before shoving him to the ground. “I’m warning you.”
The police said investigators believed Mr. Darden was the same person seen on surveillance video walking calmly from the 167th Street station minutes after Mr. Kwok was killed just before 8:45 a.m. Mr. Kwok had been standing on the platform with his wife.
Other riders on the platform did not see the attack, but they told the police that the man they saw leaving the station was the same man shown in the video, who was seen boarding a bus two minutes later.
Until the man assaulted in the West Fourth Street attack, who is also Asian, identified Mr. Darden on Tuesday as his attacker, no probable cause had existed to arrest him. But shortly after tying him to the earlier crime, Police took Mr. Darden into custody on the street near his mother’s home on Grand Avenue in the Bronx. He was unarmed and went with detectives without a struggle, the police said.
On Twitter, the chief of detectives, Robert K. Boyce, praised the work of detectives “on the arrest of Kevin Darden, individual wanted in connection with the homicide in transit.”
A woman who identified herself as Mr. Darden’s mother said in an interview on Tuesday before his arrest that Mr. Darden had not lived there in months, adding, “He is homeless.” She said she had spoken to detectives and was cooperating with the investigation.
The building’s landlord, Shiouli Rahman, who lives at the adjoining address, said Mr. Darden was one of the woman’s two sons. Mr. Darden’s brother lives in East Texas. In 2011, Mr. Darden was arrested there, according to court records, and charged with pouring gasoline over his brother’s home in an apparent attempt to light it on fire. The case ultimately did not go forward, the local news media reported.
The killing on Sunday rattled riders across the subway system and immediately raised questions about a motive for the apparently random attack. Mr. Kwok’s wife, Yow Ho Lee, 59, told investigators that the man who attacked her husband said nothing before shoving Mr. Kwok and fleeing.
For several minutes afterward, the man who would soon be the subject of a manhunt by the police appeared to behave as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened — boarding a bus, getting off nearby, smoking a cigarette.
Waiting for an F train in Manhattan on Tuesday evening, Joe Wu, 35, said that the attack had frayed the nerves of subway riders as well as those of the city’s Asians. “There’s a lot of people who are talking about it,” he said. “If you look at the past few times this has happened, it’s been Asians.”
Mr. Darden has an extensive history of arrests, including, most recently, on Nov. 9 in Manhattan on a pickpocketing charge. After spending several days in jail, he was released on Friday pending a court date in January.
He was connected to the surveillance video, the police said, by a detective who believed he recognized the image of the man and pieced together his identity from arrest photographs and other information.
Two wanted posters were circulated on Tuesday among officers and residents in the Bronx.
One, bearing a video image of an unnamed man leaving the 167th Street station, was distributed widely. The other poster, with Mr. Darden’s name and a police photograph from a previous arrest, was shared only among those involved in the search or questioned by the police; it was not made public.
By late Tuesday, however, the police had released a picture of Mr. Darden, as the suspect in the West Fourth Street attack.
A couple of hours after Mr. Darden was arrested, Tatiana Nunez, 27, leaned against a railing in the middle of a subway platform at the West Fourth Street station. She said she never waited near the yellow stripe.
“Because of that,” she said, referring to the fatal push. “Because of anybody that’s walking fast or might push you by mistake.”
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