A woman was crushed to death by an oncoming subway train at the 77th Street Station in Manhattan this afternoon after she jumped on the tracks to retrieve her dropped purse, police said.
The horrific incident occurred on the crowded northbound platform shortly before 4 p.m. when the woman, described by police as 48-years-old, somehow ended up on the tracks as a train barreled towards her.
Witnesses told police that she dropped her medium-sized black handbag on the tracks then went to retrieve it.
As the No. 6 train headed towards the woman, onlookers screamed to her to lie down between the tracks.
The motorman sounded his horn eight times to warn her, witnesses said.
Other witnesses said it appeared that she was trying to climb back up but didn’t have enough time.
The woman then pressed herself against the platform wall — which only provides several inches of space between the wall and the train — and was struck.
“I felt the thud. The thud of it was like a weird feeling. When the train hit the body,” said Glenda Farr, 52, who was on the train. “You could feel like, you know, the train hit something. But I didn’t know it was a body. I lived upstate. You ever hit a deer or something? It was like that.”
Once evacuated onto the platform Farr then saw the true horror of the accident.
“All I saw was her head sticking out. She was stuck where the door is,” she said.
It was chaos on the platform as straphangers shrieked with horror upon seeing the shredded parts of her body, witnesses said.
With additional reporting by Amber Sutherland, Tom Namako, Larry Celona and Chuck Bennett