It was Shewreckstheplace’s 36th start, and second in seven days, and she had yet to win a race. In a bottom-level race at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens on Jan. 4, she was pulled up at the eighth pole, taken away in a van and subsequently euthanized. Five days later, the gelding Apex, another old warhorse, broke a leg near the three-eighths pole and was put down on the track.

On Thursday, You Take the Cake, after finishing third in a low-level sprint, fell to the ground and unseated her rider, Wilmer Garcia. The mare was taken to Ruffian Equine Medical Center in Elmont, N.Y., with a fractured neck, and she, too, was euthanized.

You Take the Cake was the 12th horse in 22 days of racing to die at Aqueduct, a neighborhood track for working-class horsemen and horses at the sport’s lower levels. The Big A, as it is known, has never been one of the nation’s most glamorous tracks, but lately it has been among its deadliest.

At its current meet, which started Dec. 3 on its winterized inner dirt track, the breakdown rate of 7.8 fatalities per 1,000 starts is more than four times the national average of 1.90, according to the Jockey Club’s Equine Injury Database.