Passenger Helped Rescue Woman Trapped Under Red Line Train Wednesday
By Mae Rice in News on May 6, 2016 5:45PM
A passenger helped rescue a woman trapped under a Red Line Train at the Clark and Division Red Line stop this week. Police said the woman was removed from the Red Line tracks at 11:37 a.m. on Wednesday, and taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital with minor injuries.
Justin Schneider, the passenger who helped rescue her, asked to be let off the train when the conductor announced a "jumper" and the train came to a halt. Schneider then got on the tracks and helped rescue the woman, comforting her while she was trapped and helping to pull her to safety through the gap between two train cars.
“I just grabbed her hand and I told her, I said, ‘Help is on the way. Just stay with me,’” Schneider told NBC.
It's unclear how the woman got on the tracks to begin with. Though the conductor referred to her as a "jumper," sources told CBS that she was sitting on the platform and fell on the tracks. It's also unclear if she was hit by the train, or merely trapped underneath it. Police had no information on whether she was in fact hit by the train; CBS and Patch report that she wasn't, while NBC reports that she was.
Schneider wasn't the only kindly figure at the scene. Reddit user jkulp posted—seemingly about the same incident, though jkulp never responded to our inquiries—that he wanted to find the conductor of the train and thank him for his positivity on the day of the accident. The conductor was "distraught" after the incident, jkulp wrote, but had previously been very making peppy announcements like "Students study hard!" over the intercom.
'This guy was so positive and I just wanted to let him know I appreciated that," jkulp wrote in the Reddit post.