Subway heroes save fallen man
Published: May 8, 2005
One wobbly straphanger is the luckiest man in the New York underground.
The rail rider faced certain doom when he apparently became overcome by the side effects of an evening of revelry and toppled into the tracks at the Union Square station yesterday just as a train was rumbling in, witnesses and police said.
But instead of meeting an untimely fate, the unidentified man was snatched from the jaws of death by an alert fellow rider and three quick moving cops.
According to witnesses, the underground drama began at about 8:15 p.m. in the NYU area station packed with people heading for a night on the town.
“As he came down to the platform, he was a bit wobbly,” said eyewitness Wednaud Ronelus, a 33-year-old teacher.
“Then he really started wobbling, and I was scared he might fall over, and then he went down face first.”
The man hit the rails moments before an uptown Q train thundered into the station.
“We thought he was dead for sure,” Ronelus said.
Fortunately, a man on the platform grabbed a police sergeant and alerted him to the drama unfolding on the tracks.
The sergeant, along with two plainclothes officers, then jumped into action.
The three bounded onto the tracks while a transit worker began frantically waving a flashlight to get the motorman’s attention.
Once he realized what was going on, the motorman slammed on the brakes, getting the train to screech to a halt about 30 feet from the fallen man.
Transit police then swooped down and lifted the lucky man up from the tracks. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital for observation.
Police last night could not provide the name of the lucky track tumbler, but he was hospitalized with minor injuries.
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