New York City Embraces Man Who Saved Stranger on Tracks
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 5, 2007
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.
He's told his story so many times it comes in gasps out of order, almost by rote.
Mainly, Autrey recalls seeing the lights of an oncoming train. "I thought, ' Somebody's got to go save this guy.' Then I thought, 'Not somebody, fool -- you got to save him!' "
As he held Hollopeter down in that trough, he spoke into the student's ear. "I said, 'You fell under the train tracks. . . . Don't move or both of us'll die.' "
And with that the train slid over them.
"Once the first car grazed my blue hat -- I felt the bottom of the train rub my hat and pull it down and the hat move back on my head."
Hollopeter asked: "Am I dead yet? Are we dead?"
"You are very much alive," Autrey replied.
Autrey said construction work taught him to think fast and maneuver in contained spaces. And the instinct to do good?
"My mom brought us all up like that," he said.
But the attention was something else. "They've been swarming all day. I feel like Princess Diana."
On Thursday he had an interview with CNN and did the morning talk shows. He traveled in a limousine to meet with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
In the Blue Room at City Hall, Bloomberg suggested Autrey might run for mayor, or even president, and awarded him the Bronze Medallion for civic achievement, which has been awarded to Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali.
A Walt Disney Co. executive offered an all-expense-paid trip to Disneyland in California. Autrey said Trump was going to give him a check for $10,000 after the news conference.
"What I did is something that every New Yorker should do. If you see somebody in distress, do the right thing. Help out. Okay?"
Autrey left City Hall in a cloud of confusion. Reporters pigeonholed his 6-year-old daughter; his sister wanted to talk privately; no one could find the address of Trump's office.
"I need my privacy 'cause I'm not used to this," he said. "I don't know how superstars deal."
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