What to Know
- Straphangers rescued a man who passed out with his body across a train trestle in Brooklyn on Thursday morning.
- Video of the ordeal shows one woman, Liliana Vicente, screaming for help and sprinting into the track bed to help the man.
- The man was seen eventually coming to after his rescue; it's not clear if he sustained any injuries or how he ended up in the track bed
Riveting cellphone video catches frantic straphangers shouting down an approaching Q train so they could save a man passed out with his body strewn across a snowy train trestle in Brooklyn Thursday morning.
Video captured by Liliana Vicente as she was waiting for a train at the Avenue H station in Flatbush shows an unconscious man slumped over in the track bed.
"Sir?" Vicente asks.
The man doesn't move. The woman then runs down the tracks, asking others to "please, help to stop" the train.
Other straphangers start yelling "Stop!" with palpable panic in their voices at the train approaching the station.
Vicente, meanwhile, presses the button on one of the station's emergency call boxes and goes back to trying to rouse the man.
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"Sir? Sir, please wake up," she says, becoming increasingly distressed. "Sir! Please wake up! Sir, wake up!"
Other straphangers, meanwhile, continue shouting "Stop!" at the train barreling in their direction.
Eventually, the train, still out of the frame, comes to a stop. Vicente says "at least she stopped."
Then, she sprints down the platform toward a service ladder. Without ever dropping her phone, she climbs down into the track bed and runs toward the man. By the time she reaches him, other straphangers have also pitched in trying to pull him to safety.
A man in a North Carolina Tar Heels sweatshirt can be seen grabbing the man by the waist and hoisting him back onto the platform. Vicente and at least one other commuter help him and then walk back toward the ladder.
"My God," she says. "Thank God the train has stopped."
A few minutes later, firefighters arrive on scene and the man has come to. It's not clear from the footage whether he has been injured in the fall or how he got there.
The man was taken to Kings County Hospital in serious condition.
Within a few seconds, the Q train that Vicente and others had tried so desperately to stop arrives at the platform — and in true New York fashion, the straphangers all get on and head their destination.
"Thank God, he's better," Vicente says as they take their seats.
Other straphangers can be heard telling her, "You ran so fast!" The straphangers all then talk with one another about what had just happened before the car returned to its normal morning commute din.
"He was very lucky," she tells other riders. "He was very lucky. It was a good thing it didn't happen worse."
