Subway Samaritan Now Must Survive Onrushing Media

New York City Embraces Man Who Saved Stranger on Tracks

Wesley Autrey and daughters Syshe, 4, left, and Shuqui, 6, look at the medallion New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg gave him for helping a man who fell onto the subway tracks. (By Bebeto Matthews -- Associated Press)

NEW YORK, Jan. 4 -- The act was beautiful and brave, and lucky.

A young film student suffered a seizure in a Harlem subway station Tuesday afternoon and toppled onto the tracks. Wesley Autrey, 50, a construction worker with two young daughters at his side, tried to tug him back onto the platform. But as a train approached, the student began to seize again, and Autrey jumped on top, pushing him into a foot-deep trough between the tracks and covering his body with his own.

Though the train braked, several cars ran over both men, passing just inches from Autrey's head, leaving grease marks on his powder-blue hat. Amazingly, they escaped with little more than scratches.

Then came the frenzy.

It took Autrey unawares. On Tuesday after the incident, he went home, stripped off his wet, stinking clothes, showered and went to work at a construction site in Brooklyn. His boss didn't believe his story at first, and then he bought Autrey a sandwich -- a hero.

Media crews soon descended on the site, and the making of a New York City hero began, with hypercompetitive tabloids and television stations, morning and late-night talk shows, and celebrity donors such as Donald Trump all vying for a piece.

In the hours and days after his heroics, nothing in Autrey's world has been the same.

Local news picked up the incident almost immediately.

In the subway and in the street near the station in Harlem where the incident occurred, people called out hello, shook his hand, held him. "You a hero," said one man. As he walked to his mother's apartment, a stranger pressed $10 in his hand.

His mother's comfortable home was a giddy war room. Autrey's sisters kept track of appointments. Media crews filed in and out. The phone rang constantly.

Autrey had just come back from a celebratory dinner and tried on his new black quilted jacket from the New York Film Academy, the school attended by Cameron Hollopeter, the 20-year-old who had suffered the seizure and was still being evaluated in a hospital Thursday. The academy also offered him a $5,000 check.

He had spent much of the day on the subway platform reenacting events at the behest of various television and newspaper crews. One tabloid reporter asked him to don a Superman suit and stand on the platform for a picture. He declined.