A New York Police Department (NYPD) lieutenant saved a homeless man from committing suicide by keeping the man from throwing himself in front of a subway train around 1 a.m. Thursday.
“I (heard) him mutter, ‘I’m just going to throw in myself in front of the train,” Lt. Ryan Murphy told the New York Daily News Friday. “He had a gym bag over his shoulder. He turned straight even with the edge of the platform and went to drop the bag to the ground, the platform itself. You can see, you can feel that he was going for it.”
“But I closed the distance and I was able to grab him, spin him and pull him back,” he added.
The heroic effort was part of an outreach program conducted in conjunction with other transit officers, NYPD nurses, and social workers as part of a plan by New York City and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) to help the homeless whose presence in the underground subway systems have raised public health concerns.
“We bring the department nurses with us, and work with the individuals, and evaluate whether the person needs help or not, and if they need help, we get the person to the hospital and get the help they need,” said Officer Serbay Gobelek with the NYPD’s Homeless Outreach Unit.
Gobelek said the man in question had shared his suicidal thoughts with the NYPD nurses who ran to help. The man was later admitted to Harlem Hospital.
The night of outreach was being conducted so the subway trains could be cleaned and disinfected, WABC reported.
New York City recently announced that it would be halting its overnight service on the subway so workers could disinfect the trains and the stations between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. starting May 6.
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