Teen fatally shot on SEPTA bus after another fistfight turns into a shooting

A teenager riding a SEPTA bus in Germantown was fatally shot Wednesday night after he and an armed passenger got into a fight, police said.

About 10:45 p.m., a young man wearing a ski mask boarded the 23 bus, heading northwest on Germantown Avenue, near Dennie Street, SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch said. Almost immediately, he started arguing with another passenger seated a few rows back, Busch said.

Video from the bus showed nearby passengers getting up to move seats as the two yelled at each other from their seats, Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore said. Eventually, the confrontation escalated into a physical fight, and the masked passenger pulled out a gun and shot the other young man in the chest, Vanore said.

At least two shots were fired, Vanore said, and one bullet burst through the bus driver’s plexiglass partition, into her compartment area.

As the bus driver, stopped on the 5200 block of Germantown Avenue, called for help, the shooter fled, Busch said. Officers rushed the victim — whom police have described as a juvenile “in his late teens” — to Einstein Medical Center, where he died a short time later.

Vanore said the teen had no identification on him at the time, and remains unidentified.

There were about eight other passengers on the bus at the time, Busch said.

It remains unclear what the two were fighting about, and whether they knew each other before meeting on the bus, Vanore said.

The teen is the third person to be shot riding a SEPTA bus in just the last week, and law enforcement officials say the shooting is just the latest example of mundane arguments escalating to gunfire because of widespread access to guns.

“This pattern is repeating itself far too often,” said Transit Police Chief Charles Lawson. “Far too often in the city, far too often in SEPTA.”

“Seemingly everyone has access to a gun, and the propensity to use it over meaningless arguments is shocking,” he said.

Last Wednesday, two 18-year-olds were injured in a shooting in North Philadelphia, after gunfire erupted on the 33 bus, near 21st and Diamond Streets.

And just days before that, 14-year-old Wort Whipple was fatally shot on the Market-Frankford subway line.

In that case, Vanore said, Whipple and another individual got into an altercation on the train, and when it reached the 52nd Street station and the doors opened, the fight spilled onto the platform. The person then shot Whipple twice in the arm and chest and fled the scene.

Police recovered the shooter’s clothes burned on the ground a few blocks away, Vanore said. The killing remains unsolved.

While SEPTA’s transit police have worked to increase their presence on the subways, policing the bus system, which runs more than 100 routes and has about 1,000 vehicles, remains a bit of a strategic challenge. Still, Busch said, “we will look at whether we can do more of those regular bus check-ins.”

Busch said all stations and vehicles are outfitted with hundreds of cameras, including 10 to 14 on each bus alone. Video footage has been critical to their investigations, he said, and should serve as a warning to anyone considering committing crimes on the transit system.

But policing alone can’t prevent these kinds of crimes, Lawson said.

“Society as a whole has to take a stand on these incidents,” he said. “Police deployment and strategy alone is not the answer. The city has to get fed up.”