Suspect arrested in 2 unprovoked attacks on BART trains

BART police arrested a man Monday they suspect is responsible for man two seemingly random attacks on trains last week. The arrest was made just hours after BART police released surveillance photos of the suspect. less BART police arrested a man Monday they suspect is responsible for man two seemingly random attacks on trains last week. The arrest was made just hours after BART police released surveillance photos of the ... more Photo: BART Police Photo: BART Police Image 1 of / 22 Caption Close Suspect arrested in 2 unprovoked attacks on BART trains 1 / 22 Back to Gallery

A suspect in two unprovoked attacks on passengers riding on BART trains in the past week was arrested Monday morning, hours after police released surveillance photos of him, officials said.

Mario Christopher Washington, 42, was arrested just before 9 a.m. Monday near Ninth Street and Broadway in downtown Oakland, officials said.

BART Deputy Police Chief Ed Alvarez said an Oakland firefighter recognized the suspect from the surveillance images and reported him to police.

Oakland and BART police officers arrested Washington, a Berkeley resident, within 2½ hours of the images being released.

Early Monday, BART police had asked for the public’s help in identifying the attacker.

On Thursday, just after 7:30 p.m., the man hit a victim sitting on the train between the San Leandro and Bay Fair stations with a pair of bolt cutters, then punched and kicked him before running from the train, according to BART police.

Witnesses told police the attack was unprovoked, and the victim was taken to a hospital for treatment for a laceration on his head, police said.

Two days later, police said, the same attacker was on a San Francisco-bound train pulling into Embarcadero Station about 7:30 p.m. when he approached a stranger and punched him in the face twice. The victim was treated at the scene for non-life-threatening injuries, police said.

The suspect was described as a 6-foot-tall, muscular black man in his late 30s with close-cropped hair, who in the first incident was wearing a gray shirt with writing that included an “N” on the front, tan shorts and black shoes. In the second incident, the man was wearing a white T-shirt with writing on the front, tan shorts and sunglasses.

Images of the suspect were captured by cameras on the trains. BART used to use decoy cameras in many trains to deter crime, but finished replacing all the fake cameras with real ones this summer.

When officials were asked why they waited to release the images, they cited protocol. Alvarez said they released the images only after they knew the man was a suspect in both attacks.

The two random attacks came as BART crime statistics — released to The Chronicle in response to a public records request — show a 27 percent jump in assaults and a 35 percent increase in robberies throughout the transportation system for the first six months of the year compared with the same period in 2016.

Filipa Ioannou and Alison Graham are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: fioannou@sfchronicle.com, agraham@sfchronicle.com