If I’d seen this in a movie, I would’ve said it was too far-fetched to believe: a 50-year-old man saved a 20-year-old stranger’s life after the other guy suffered some sort of seizure and fell from a New York subway platform onto the tracks. The older man — who was with his two young daughters, no less — dove onto the tracks himself and held the seizure victim down in the small space between the rails as a train roared past only inches above their heads. Neither man was badly injured, although Wesley Autrey, the hero of our story, emerged with a smear of grease on his stocking cap where the underside of the train grazed his head. The man he saved, Cameron Hollopeter, is in the hospital but I’d guess that’s as much to determine what happened to him before the train as from any damage the train did.
I’ve read the article I linked to above three times now, and I just keep shaking my head at the amazing-ness of it. How cool is it that there are people in the world who give enough of a damn (and who are fast-thinking enough) to do something like this for another human being? We all like to think that we’d be the hero ourselves if we found ourselves in a situation that required it, but how many of us would really rise to the occasion? I think I’d probably just stand there like an idiot. This story is both humbling and uplifting…
(Hat tip to Brian Greenberg for letting me know about this…)
I think I can say with some confidence that I would have stood on the platform and watched the train run him over.
I say this not to be cold about it, but to point out that people like this are indeed heroes, not because they mirror what we read about in comic books, but because their bravery is uncommon.
If we all had it in us to do something like this, then it wouldn’t be so amazing. What makes him a hero is that most of us wouldn’t do what he did.
Absolutely. And, I would add, he did what a lot of us couldn’t do, which is actually save both the victim and his own life. I have an uncomfortable feeling that even if I were to try something like this, I’d probably muff it up and get myself killed as well…
well not to say I’m a huge fan of the film, but the catalyst for Sandra Bullock’s arc in While You Were Sleeping was her rescuing the man of her dreams off the EL track in Chicago. So it has been done in films but again, pretty amazing story. The nonchalant attitude of the rescuer (in the real event) is what is so amazing. He just shrugs it off and still doesn’t consider himself a hero. That’s where the beauty of his character shine.