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Man Hijacks NYC Trains Over 100 Times

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A Queens transit obsessive who never crashed a train has spent three decades cycling in and out of prison for the one thing he loves most.

Darius McCollum doesn’t fit the profile of a hijacker. He has never sped through a station, never injured a passenger, never damaged a single railcar. Yet by early 2017 the Queens native had been arrested 32 times for commandeering New York City buses and subway trains, driven by a compulsion tied to his diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome rather than any intent to cause harm.

• McCollum memorized the entire New York City subway map by age eight and, after being stabbed by a schoolmate at 11, found refuge among transit workers who taught him the job and gave him keys and uniforms.
• He first made national news in 1981 at age 15 when he was arrested for safely driving an in-service E train, packed with passengers, for six stops.
• In November 2015 he was arrested again after taking an empty Greyhound bus from the Port Authority Bus Terminal and driving it to Brooklyn — one incident in a pattern spanning more than 100 unauthorized trips.

A Fixation That Started in Childhood

McCollum’s relationship with the MTA began as a coping mechanism. After the stabbing at age 11 left him afraid of his own neighborhood, he retreated into the subway system, where conductors and station agents treated him less like a nuisance and more like an eager kid who happened to know every line, every switch, and every timetable better than some of the people running it. Those same workers, according to reporting on his case, occasionally let him take shifts — a kindness that hardened into habit.

That habit followed him into adulthood. Unlike the alarming portrait of a rogue operator threatening commuters, McCollum’s actual method was almost bureaucratic in its precision: board an empty or in-service train, drive the assigned route, hit the scheduled stops, and stay on timetable. Investigators and transit officials who dealt with him repeatedly noted that his runs never deviated from official procedure — which is part of why nobody caught him faster.

Rejected By the Job He Wanted Most

The most striking detail in McCollum’s file isn’t the arrests — it’s the paperwork. He applied for real MTA positions multiple times over the years and scored well on the qualifying exams. Every application was denied because of his criminal record, a catch-22 that left him locked out of the one career that could have legitimately satisfied the compulsion driving his arrests.

He memorized the subway map by age eight — and spent the next four decades trying to actually get paid to run it.

That cycle — arrest, incarceration, release, transit-wide security alert, repeat — became so predictable that MTA officials reportedly braced for another incident every time McCollum walked out of prison. The pattern speaks to something broader than any single case, and it’s the kind of compulsive, repetitive behavior that mental health professionals studying conditions on the autism spectrum point to when arguing that punishment alone rarely addresses the underlying condition.

The Push for Mental Health Court

Facing long prison terms after his 2015 Greyhound arrest, McCollum’s legal team argued for treatment over incarceration, pushing to have his case routed through mental health court rather than standard criminal proceedings. The argument leaned on the same facts that had defined his record for 30 years: no injuries, no property damage, no evidence of malicious intent — just an unshakable pull toward buses and trains that traditional sentencing had never managed to break.

His story reached a wider audience in 2016 through Adam Irving’s documentary Off the Rails, which traced McCollum’s decades of arrests alongside interviews with the transit workers who’d once handed him keys. The film reframed a man New York tabloids had long treated as a menace as something closer to a case study — the kind of story that intersects with broader conversations happening in mental health circles about how the justice system handles compulsive behavior tied to developmental conditions.

McCollum’s case was still working through the courts as 2017 began, with his attorneys continuing to press for psychiatric treatment instead of another stretch behind bars — the same argument they’d been making, largely unsuccessfully, since long before anyone outside New York knew his name.