A 40-year-old woman was shoved onto the subway tracks on Thursday morning, police said, miraculously surviving the attack after ducking under the path of an oncoming 5 train.
"Very lucky woman," an NYPD spokesperson told Gothamist. "He pushed her when the train was actually coming into the station, train went over her but didn't hit her."
The commuting nightmare happened just before 8:30 a.m. on the northbound platform of the 4/5/6 train at Union Square. Firefighters cut power to the tracks and rescued the woman from under the train.
A suspect in his 20s was immediately apprehended at the scene for the "unprovoked assault," police said. The woman was hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries.
The incident came one day after a man was pushed onto the trackbed at 42nd Street-Bryant Park, following a verbal dispute with an individual who was begging for money, according to the NYPD.
A surveillance image of the man who allegedly shoved a rider onto the 42nd Street-Bryant Park subway track on Wednesday
The 36-year-old victim escaped the trackbed without serious injury. The alleged shover fled the station, and was last seen wearing a red and white track suit. Police described him as 5'7" man in his 20s.
A spokesperson for the NYPD said that the two incidents were not believed to be related.
In 2019, the MTA reported 195 collisions between trains and people — the highest number in at least a decade, according to the New Yorker. Seventy people were struck between March and late August of this year, only 15 fewer than the previous year, despite plummeting ridership due to the pandemic.
A spokesperson for the MTA did not say whether they specifically track incidents of people being pushed onto the subway tracks.
