Trying to rescue a teenager from a subway track as a train roared in, Wesley Autrey faced a harrowing choice: try to pull the young man to the platform, or push him down and hope to find a safe harbour between the rails.
”I tried to pull him up, but I had to make a split decision whether or not to struggle and maybe end up getting us both killed,” Autrey said later. ”So I just chose to dive on top of him and pin him down.”
It worked. The train passed over them, saving the 19-year-old who had fallen, police said. A relative identified him as Cameron Hollopeter, a student at the New York Film Academy.
Hollopeter’s stepmother, Rachel Hollopeter, said Autrey was ”an angel”.
”He was so heroic,” she said early on Wednesday in a telephone interview. ”If he wasn’t there, this would be a whole different call.”
The teenager had a medical problem on Tuesday and tumbled on to the tracks at a station in northern Manhattan, police said.
Autrey, waiting with his two young daughters, jumped down and rolled with the young man into the trough between the rails as a southbound train came into the station.
The drainage trough is typically about 30,5cm deep but can be as shallow as 20cm or as deep as 61cm, a New York City Transit spokesperson said.
The train’s operator put the emergency brakes on. Before the train stopped, two cars passed over the men — with about 5cm to spare, Autrey said. Neither man was hit, police said. Authorities said the rescued man was in stable condition later on Tuesday at a local hospital.
Autrey (50) declined medical attention. Onlookers cheered him, hugged him and called him a hero.
”I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help,” he told the New York Times. ”I did what I felt was right.” — Sapa-AP