WAAAY BEHIND THE YELLOW LINE: Riders at the 81st Street station stand well clear of the platform edge yesterday as a train rolls in a day after the deadly subway horror. (Warzer Jaff)
He swears he isn’t nervous. After all, he’s from Bay Ridge, and he’s been taking the train since before he was old enough to put on his own pants.
Still, Richard DeAngelis finds he’s having trouble peeling himself off the wall of a Manhattan subway platform when the hulking Q train rumbles in on the tracks.
It was here, at the 49th Street station, that a rider was pushed to his death, and DeAngelis — even with a small army of uniformed police on the platform — isn’t taking any chances.
“I have to take the train,” says DeAngelis, a public-safety officer at NYU. “But I’m staying away from the edge of the platform.”
Desmond Hardison says it’s going to take a mighty big guy to push him in front of a train.
Even so, that doesn’t stop the head above his thick neck and shoulders from swiveling back and forth, looking around, just in case someone wants to give it a try.
“It pays to watch out all the time,” said Hardison, 64, of Queens, who retired from a career in the Army several years ago. “It’s New York. You need to keep your eyes open.”
Even the most hardened New Yorker is forced to pause when a random rider is suddenly pushed to his death in front of a speeding subway train.
That’s what cops say happened to Ki Suk Han, 58, Monday afternoon when he crossed paths with a deranged man on a narrow subway platform north of Times Square.
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In a city beset by terrorism strikes and hurricane catastrophes, getting pushed onto a subway track in front of a speeding train is still the worst possible nightmare.
“It’s just very scary,” said Sarah Chandler as she stepped off a Q train and into the middle of a police investigation.
Yards away, at a bank of turnstiles, police are handing out fliers with the suspect’s picture.
Chandler, who works in software product management, is rushing to a job interview. Her last job ended three months ago, and she’s desperate to get back to work.
But she manages to find time to stop and learn about the tragedy.
When another rider tells her about Han’s final, terrifying moments, Chandler instinctively moves closer to the wall, even though the train is already in the station and won’t move for another few minutes.
Leigh Weingus, a Manhattan Web-site editor, actually witnessed the fatal encounter. She’s not sure if she’s traumatized over the event, but that doesn’t stop her from swiping her MetroCard the next day at the same time and place.
But before she boards the train, she huddles with a police investigator who’s trying piece together the horror.
“Everyone was screaming,” Weingus said. “It was horrifying. It was terrible. Everyone was running toward the booth. When the Q train was coming, everyone was trying to stop the train; there was a man on the track. All I saw was that it clearly didn’t stop in time for him to survive.”
Raishaud Brady heard about Han’s death on the news, but not for a minute did he think about taking the bus or a cab from The Bronx where he lives to his job at a Midtown restaurant.
“Things like this happen all the time,” says Brady, 29, a chef. “I feel bad. But I’m still going to ride the Q train.”
Among the passengers on one Q train car was a man talking to himself for several stops. On any other day, Brady says, riders would have paid him no mind.
“But you could see all the people getting nervous,” Brady says. “There’s a lot of fear.”
Not everywhere. At the Port Authority station, just 10 blocks away from where the worst possible thing that can happen on the subway has happened, straphangers are as matter-of-fact about Han’s death as they are about a fare hike.
A young man stands near the platform edge, his Beats By Dre headphones booming in his ears.
A young woman types incessantly on her iPhone, oblivious to any underground threat. Her device is called a smartphone, which is more than anyone can say about her.
Bart Daudelin, meanwhile, doesn’t miss a thing. He says he’s old school for carrying a newspaper on the train, but he’s far less distracted when he’s standing on the platform.
“I’ve seen things on the train my whole life,” says Daudelin, 43, a labor-union executive. “It could happen to anybody anytime. You see people texting and stuff at the edge of the platform. You’re just asking for it.”