Yesterday morning, a man was struck by a southbound 2 train at the 110th Street/Central Park North station just around 10 a.m. The unidentified victim, who was taken to St. Luke's Hospital in stable condition, narrowly avoided becoming the seventh subway fatality of the year. And that's in part thanks to Brad Pamnani, a 24-year-old biotech student at Columbia University who jumped onto the tracks to help the victim. "After I was out of the subway station I was like, 'Oh my god, I can't believe I just did that,'" Pamnani told us. "This was a crazy start of the day for me. I was just going to class."
Pamnani said he was on his way to class around 9:55 a.m. on Tuesday, waiting for the southbound express train, when he noticed a man standing next to him: "He looked a little shaky at first, but I didn't really pay attention because I was in my own world." Then the train pulled into the station, "and this lady right next to me, she just turns around and she says. 'Oh my God! I can't see this.' And I looked right there, and this guy who was standing next to me is now under the train."
Pamnani noted that the train was about 3/4 on top of him: "The only thing we could see from the top was his face under the train." It seems the engineer saw him just as he jumped, and was able to pull the emergency brake. "So I just put my bag down and I jumped down into the tracks to get this guy out. And this other guy also jumps with me, and we both are trying to get the guy out and see if he's still alive or crushed or whatever." Once they were able to do so, other people on the platform helped pull them all up.
The engineer, who called NYPD Emergency Unit, had come out at this point, and Pamnani says she was yelling and crying, "Oh my god, I can't believe this man jumped right in front of me." The victim was still unresponsive at this point: "So I ask him to breathe, keep breathing, keep moving his hands, and I'm checking his pulse to see if he's doing OK. His pulse was actually super low. And I asked him what's going on and he said, 'I got really dizzy."
Other witnesses initially claimed that the man had purposefully leaped toward the train in a suicide attempt, but Pamnani, who has training as a Red Cross volunteer, doesn't think so:
We kept asking him, 'Why did you fall,' and he just said, 'Oh I'm really dizzy.' His legs were really seriously shaking the entire time, even after the police got there. So that probably was the blood pressure ...I definitely believed him because I could see his blood pressure at that time. His pulse was really low and his legs were shaking.
Pamnani said he was thankful the other man jumped in to help him ("because I'm not that big of a guy"), and noted he had never been on the tracks before: "The only thing I've heard about tracks is rats and a lot of shocking electric lines. So obviously I didn't want to jump into the middle of that." As for what he thinks should be done to protect people on the platform, he thought sliding doors could cause problems, but liked the idea of guard rails:
I've been to Japan and they have one of those railings all along the platform except the door areas, where there are gaps, and then the entire platform is surrounded by those railings, those metal railings, so nobody can really fall—they're like three or four feet tall.
As for instinctively reacting to help the fallen man, Pamnani didn't think it was a big deal, much like other subway heroes including Ramiro Ocasio. "His body was completely under the train," said Pamnani, "and at the sight of a man under a train, I think anybody would try to do the same thing."
