Posted on 12/04/2012 3:57:28 PM PST by Arthurio
The New York Post is facing criticism over its decision to publish a front-page photo of a man, pushed onto the subway tracks in Midtown on Monday, trying to climb to safety before being fatally struck by an oncoming train.
Ki Suk Han, a 58-year-old from Queens, N.Y., was hurled from the 49th Street station platform onto the tracks by "a deranged man" around 12:30 p.m., according to the paper. Han was attempting to calm the man, apparently a panhandler, when a scuffle broke out, police say. The man then pushed him onto the tracks.
Witnesses told police the man had been harassing people on the platform. "At least one witness felt that the aggressor was emotionally disturbed," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne told The New York Times.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Since you asked.....there is a crawl space under the ledge his hands are grappling onto. He panicked. But if he had not he could have crouched in the crawl space and missed the train by inches
Here is a subway worker taking refuge in a wall alcove, apparently surviving a train passing him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si-3yzODTv8
The fact that the victim was drinking probably didn't help matters. I have read that a suspect is being interviewed after being ID’ed by ex co-workers.
I grew up there and traveled on the subway regularly until I got married, moved away for a few years...and then came back during the darkest period (in the 80s). That was when the incident I mentioned occurred.
The subway can be pretty horrible, but it’s a fast, efficient form of travel through a densely populated space. The only thing that I wish is that NYC as a whole would deal with the many stark raving mad “street people” who are allowed to live, not only in the streets, but in the subways and parks and any public space. They should all be institutionalized, which is what used to happen to them when I was a kid.
There are fully staffed mental hospitals all over the state...totally empty. They’re kept staffed because of a combination of unions and the political need to provide jobs for those rural areas.
However, they’re empty because nobody can be sent there now.
I worked for a Catholic volunteer organization in the late 60s, and we would normally pick people up from the Bowery and, if we couldn’t deal with them because they were not just alcoholics but were mentally ill, we’d have them committed. They lived in cottages, were well-treated, medicated, and we visited them regularly. Then they’d be released into our custody until they either recovered enough to resume their lives or had to be committed again. At a certain point, this could go into long-term committment.
And then we had the passage of the law relating to “community mental health care,” sponsored by the ACLU, which seemed to believe that the mentally ill were just expressing themselves in a slightly unusual way.
This destroyed the mental hospitals and their programs. The last time I remember visiting one of our residents who had gone off the deep end (and who in the past had been committed to a lovely little 6-person cabin with great, dedicated nurses), the state had shut down his program and he was living in an 8-bed (four bunkbed) “independent living unit” in the unheated garage of a local person.
Of course, only a year or two later, the state stopped paying anything and these folks all hit the street. And for anybody who thought this might have been a cost saving, the cost was enormous in terms of everything from increased emergency room visits and hospitalization, sanitation services for the subway stations turned into latrines, confinement and legal costs for them after their arrests...and the biggest cost of all, medical expenses and lost income for their victims and the families of these victims. Nobody ever considers the negative economic impact of the roaming mentally ill on their surrounding society.
it was the microphones’ fault.
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Thanks, I ‘neglected’ one of the better examples....
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