Caught On Video: Man Rescued After Falling Onto Subway Tracks
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - The Thursday morning commute was anything but ordinary for some straphangers in Brooklyn.
Sara Linda arrived to catch the Q train at the Avenue H subway station in Brooklyn around 10 a.m. and spotted a man lying on the tracks.
A Manhattan-bound train was headed into the station.
Linda and several other straphangers were able to signal the train to stop before it came all the way into the station. They were able to pull the man to safety.
CBS2's Ali Bauman spoke with one of those Good Samaritans late Thursday night.
In cellphone video of the incident, daycare worker Liliana Vincente can be heard screaming, "please help him!" She never saw him fall, she just saw him bleeding and passed out cold.
Gasping for air, she hit what she thought was an emergency stop button on the platform.
"Sir, sir, please wake up," she yelled.
"It was so bad the feeling, because I thought the worse -- it could run the train over him," Vincente told Bauman.
As the train's headlights approached the platform, she dropped her things and desperately flailed her arms.
"People and I start waving the train, screaming to stop the train," she said.
When it did, Vincente did not miss a beat, jumping down onto the snowy tracks and running over to the man she had never met.
"I start screaming at him to see if he wakes up, because he was unconscious. It was so bad," she said.
Once he was out of harm's way, the man woke up and spoke to Vincente in Spanish.
"He didn't even realize he's unconscious. He was like, 'I want to go home,'" she told Bauman.
Paramedics brought the man to a nearby hospital, where he is in serious condition and being treated for head injuries.
Vincente said the whole thing keeps replaying in her head over and over again. But she also said not for one second would she have done anything other than help the man.
"You never know what can happen. It can happen to you, it can happen to me," she said.
She told Bauman she was trying to record a selfie video when she first noticed the man and then just kept recording. After the ordeal, she got on the train and worked a full day.
There was no word as to why the man had fallen onto the tracks.
