A man escaped death and miraculously pulled himself off the tracks after an F train ran over him Tuesday afternoon.
The man, who police did not identify, was waiting for an uptown train at the Delancey Street station when he suddenly felt ill and collapsed onto the tracks at 1:34 p.m., police said. Whether by luck, or through his own effort, somehow the man, in his 50s, ended up in the shallow trough between the rails.
Police said the man was taken to Bellevue Hospital with only bruises.
“It’s unbelievable,” Allen Stern, a witness, said of the man’s survival. “That’s a one in a million.”
Stern was headed home to Queens, riding in the first car of the train that ran over the man, when he noticed that the crowd on the platform was acting strangely. “It looked like they were screaming and yelling,” Stern said. “People had this look on their faces like something happened.”
When the train came to a sudden stop before reaching the end of the platform, the crowd moved to the edge and looked down into the tracks, Stern said. The motorman came out of his cab and walked to a space between the cars, shining a flashlight into the tracks.
Police arrived, then the fire department. The crowd was calm, Stern said. After several minutes the man came out from under the train, was placed on a stretcher and taken out from the southbound platform.
“He went up under his own power so he was able to move,” said Charles Seaton, a NYC Transit spokesman.
The train operator pulled the emergency break when he saw the victim fall, but by the time the wheels had screeched to a halt, the first three cars had already passed over the man, Seaton explained.
“Given the fact that three subway cars passed over him, he was extremely fortunate,” Seaton said.
Bellevue officials said last night that the man was in fair condition, but it was not clear whether he would be admitted to the hospital.
Service on the F line was halted for about 45 minutes, until 2:14 p.m., a transit official said.
Story from Newsday.com