This post has been updated.
The suspect remained in custody Wednesday afternoon but refused to cooperate with an investigation, Metro spokesman Richard Jordan said. Jordan said the woman refused to provide investigators with her name, so she was being charged as “Jane Doe” until fingerprinting could be used to determine her identity.
“We’re waiting on those fingerprint results,” Jordan said.
Metro riders who witnessed the incident said an intercom on the train appeared not to be working when calls were made for help.
Tara Young said she got on the train as she usually does at the Court House station. She said she noticed a young mother and her child get on the train’s second car at that stop. The child, she said, was cute and expressive as she chatted with her mom about visiting a museum downtown while playing with a pair of sunglasses as she sat, strapped in her stroller. The two were in the standing-room area of the car.
As the train left Rosslyn and was in the tunnel, Young said she looked up to see another passenger on the train trying to lift the girl out of her stroller. The mother, according to Young, started to yell, “Don’t touch my daughter. Let go of my daughter.”
She said the mother and child were screaming.
A Metro spokeswoman confirmed the account, saying a 2-year-old girl was strapped in a stroller and riding with her mother when another woman approached them. The suspect tried to pull the toddler out of the stroller, authorities said, but was not able to because the child was strapped across the chest.
An eyewitness intervened and tackled the suspect, holding her until police arrived on the scene at the Foggy Bottom station.
Other passengers on the train — mostly young men, according to Young — grabbed the woman from behind and held her across the chest. Young said it appeared that the suspect they grabbed was “shocked and scared.”
Young said she and another passenger hit the emergency button on the train to try to reach the train’s operator on the intercom. Young said she gave the train operator the car number and the operator responded, “is something going on?”
“We need to stop the train,” she recalled saying. “A woman tried to grab a baby,” Young said another passenger said into the intercom.
But she said she couldn’t hear the train operator and the intercom seemed scratchy.
“The train operator didn’t give us any communication,” said Young, who works in Web communications at the Nuclear Energy Institute. “There was no response for 30 seconds. … We kept saying we need help back here. All we got was fuzzy interception.”
The train operator also kept asking the riders to repeat the information, according to Young. At one point, communication ceased.
The train operator, “never came back with a follow-up of ‘don’t worry.’ Or ‘we’ve phoned the police’ or ‘we’ll be stopping at the next station,'” Young said. “She kept asking us to clarify what car we were on … She kept needing me to repeat.”
When the train stopped at Foggy Bottom, authorities got on and took the woman into custody.
Another rider, Alice Bettencourt, 49, of Arlington, remembers the mother yelling “Get off my baby, get off my baby!”
She said at least four people worked to subdue the suspect, with one passenger putting her in a chokehold against a seat and a few others holding her down until the train pulled into Foggy Bottom. She said the suspect appeared lethargic, not “like somebody on PCP, fighting fiercely.”
Bettencourt attempted to notify authorities, but her cellphone call didn’t go through, she said. Another passenger’s call was dropped, she said. She remembers a woman attempting to use the intercom to no avail.
“She said it did nothing,” Bettencourt recalled. “The big issue was we’re stuck under the Potomac and couldn’t get to the operator, to the outside world.”
When the train arrived at Foggy Bottom, a rider finally ran up to the first car to notify the driver of the incident before the train left the platform. Police arrived shortly thereafter.
“He went into the car and immediately took his cuffs out,” Bettencourt said.
Young said she told Metro authorities about how the intercom appeared to not work.
“It was kind of a shock to realize that it is not a fool-proof system,” she said. “You would think the emergency system would be checked and be in good working condition when you are using it.”
Metro officials said the case is under investigation. Sherri Ly, a Metro spokeswoman, said she did not immediately know anything about intercoms malfunctioning on the train. The train, Ly said, did stop and hold at the Foggy Bottom station until transit police arrived.
The transit agency has come under criticism in the past for its intercom system not working well in emergency situations.
Another rider, Matt Paolillo, who was on the first train car at the time of the incident, said he could see through the window into the second rail car that there was a “big scuffle” when the other riders subdued the suspect.
“It looked like a fight,” he said. When he got off at Foggy Bottom, Paolillo said he heard about what happened on the train and he saw police “peeling people off of the [suspect] on the train.”
“It’s crazy,” said Paolillo, who has lived in the Washington area for five years and regularly rides Metro from Virginia Square to his office near Foggy Bottom, where he works as a tax lawyer. “I’ve seen a normal amount of weird things on the Metro, but this is pretty monumental. Pretty bizarre.”
The suspect will be charged in D.C., Metro said Wednesday.
Correction: The witness was quoted as telling the train operator, “something is going on.” It was the train operator who asked via the intercom, “is something going on?”