Accident: Man Under Train

It was Friday night, March 30, 11 p.m. I was riding the 4 train to Union Square. I was in the car two down from the center. We were moving very fast. I looked down at my small notebook, and when I looked up again the train had stopped at the station without any stumble of cessation, as if by magic. I don't know how we arrived so suddenly.

There was something wrong. The doors remained closed. "The emergency brake has been activated," came the announcement. We waited 30 seconds. Then the train lurched forward five feet and stopped, but the doors remained closed. I heard the sickening words, "Someone fell in there," as a group of pedestrians on the platform hovered outside our locked-down car. They were looking down through the sliver of space between the train and the platform.

The door opened and I got out. People huddled nearby. "He was drunk." "He was passed out." "He fell in there and he couldn't move so he crawled under there." "Yo, we told the person upstairs that someone fell on the track and that you should stop the trains. But they never stopped." "Oh shit, he's fucked-up. He's shredded. That operator ought to be drug-tested."

"Did you see it?" a rookie cop asked me.

"No," I said.

"Jesus..." He shook his head.

"He fell on the tracks, and he crawled under the platform," said somebody. This was at the midpoint of the platform?maybe six cars had passed over him.

"Sir, don't move," called out another cop, shining a flashlight between the gap onto the man under the train.

I could see him clearly now. He was alive. He was Caucasian, with close-cropped light brown hair and a clean, matching goatee. His face was thin but not gaunt, and he appeared to be of average height and weight. He had blood on his face, but there was no sign of where it came from. His eyes?his eyes were strange. They were another place, glazed, seeing but unaware, half-closed, blinking very slowly. He was somewhere else. For a minute I thought he was departing.

"All trains are going to bypass the station," called out a voice.

"Get me crowd control," barked a cop, and in five minutes the area was cleared and entrances and exits red-taped. I stood still and scribbled in the notebook as people were guided away from the platform.

"How do they get him out of there?" I asked a scruffy-looking MTA fellow who was also taking notes on a pad of paper.

"Who are you?" he said.

"Press."

"First one I've been to where the guy's alive," he replied, "so I don't know."

I read in "Slackjaw" a couple of years ago that what you're supposed to do when you fall onto the tracks is to lie down between the rails. The train will, you hope, pass over you. Do not go under the ledge?the crawlspace under the platform?even though it seems safe. There are big, nasty spokes that conduct electricity to the train that will rip up your guts as the train goes by.

This guy had gone under the ledge. I saw the conductor pacing the platform. "Do the emergency brakes trigger automatically when the train hits something under the ledge?" I asked him.

"Who are you?" he asks.

"Press."

He throws his hands in the air. "No no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. If you want to ask any questions ask the supervisor over there." He shuffled away.

The paramedics arrived in less than 10 minutes. The FDNY, NYPD and MTA were all represented. I was the only nonemergency person on the platform. An MTA employee began working his way underneath the train to get to the man. The man, I could see, was moving. He was crawling, very slowly, trying to get out from under the train. I don't know if he knew where he was. But he was alive and able to move, and that in itself seemed a miracle.

They opened the door on the side of the car opposite the platform and MTA men in orange vests brought a stretcher board to strap the man down and carry him out on. This took maybe 20-25 minutes, and then he was brought out. A group of firemen in their dirty yellow jackets surrounded the shrouded body and carried him up out of the station. I could see his boots. They were clean.

"See, he's okay, yeah, yeah," exclaimed the relieved motorman who'd been driving the train.

"Yeah, he's got all his body parts," responded the almost jubilant conductor, looking surprised. Their exuberance was frightful. I dared not look at them.

The entire incident lasted between 40 and 45 minutes. The man was taken out on the board to a waiting ambulance. When I followed out with a cluster of policemen, almost all of Union Square Station was shut down. Red tape was slung low and MTA workers guarded stairways. Now that the man had been taken off, it felt like a dramatic but not tragic event.

It is very rare that someone survives such an incident. Two days later I called the police department and was told the man had died. He had expired at 2:50 a.m. that morning from trauma suffered in the accident. His name was Edward O. Drabik, age 55. Now only a memory of a man in the grip of death.