Metro

Subway angel helped in vain

TRAGIC ENDING: Emily Singleton was found dead on the subway tracks after stumbling away from a woman who was trying to assist her. (
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A good Samaritan desperately tried to help a disoriented young actress who was stumbling around a subway train — but the incoherent woman slipped away and was later found dead on the tracks.

“I tried to help her, and then when she ran . . . I just wanted to think it wasn’t her when they told me’’ she was dead, a shaken Allison Keller, 28, told The Post yesterday. “I just moved here from Ohio. She was my age, she was young. I was just trying to help. It’s just too much.”

Keller first spotted an apparently drunken Emily Singleton, 22, of Park Slope unable to speak and struggling to stay on a bench at the West 14th Street subway station early Sunday.

Singleton — a minister’s daughter and recent Bucknell University grad from Downington, Pa. — had just come from McKenna’s Pub on West 14th Street.

Bar owner Brian McKenna, 54, said Singleton came into the pub at around 10:30 p.m. Saturday “and left at around 12, not drunk or stumbling or anything. She was here with, like, two or three girls and . . . one guy, at least.”

The group left together, he said. But by the time Singleton got into the subway at 14th Street at around 1:40 a.m., she was alone and “seemed to be disoriented,’’ said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

The contents of her purse had spilled on the floor, Kelly said, and Keller, who also lives in Brooklyn and was standing nearby waiting for a train, helped her gather her belongings and get on the next southbound No. 2.

On the train, Singleton wobbled around, leaning on the car’s doors and falling to the floor at one point and touching another rider’s purse, a law-enforcement source said.

When the train pulled into the Canal Street station, “the good Samaritan tried to urge [Singleton] to stay on the train,’’ Kelly said. “But she got out.”

Singleton’s soot-covered body was found hours later, at around 1:30 p.m., in the trough between the tracks at the station.

Law-enforcement sources have said they believe she drunkenly fell on the tracks and struck her head.

Singleton had recently moved to the city to pursue her dream of working on Broadway.

One pal, Patrick Cheng, 24, of Brooklyn said he might have been the last person to hear from her.

“I was texting with her’’ up until 1:41 a.m. Sunday about her partying through the night, including at a friend’s birthday bash, he said.

Cheng said that when he didn’t hear from her again, he called her phone at 3:44 a.m.

Keller answered, having picked up Singleton’s purse and phone after she left them on the train.

Cheng and Keller met, and Keller gave him both. He gave them to Singleton’s brother on Monday.

Cheng, who has talked to cops, added that he heard there may have been some “creepy guy’’ coming on to Singleton at some point earlier that night, but he had no other details.

Additional reporting by Larry Celona and Kate Sheehy