An MBTA Transit Police sergeant talked a suicidal man away from the electrified third rail and out of a Back Bay Station train pit Wednesday night. “He came within 2 inches of sitting down on the third rail,’’ Sergeant Brian Carey said of a 50-year-old Burlington man who threatened to electrocute himself. “I told him nothing’s worth dying for,’’ Carey, 47, said. When Carey arrived, he found the man on the Orange Line tracks and more than 50 people watching. Carey engaged the man in conversation, trying to distract him while MBTA workers shut off power to the tracks.
I love this brief notice. It reminds me of Wesley Autrey, the "Subway Superman" from a couple of years ago, an ordinary New Yorker who jumped down on a subway track and restrained a man suffering from an epileptic fit as a train was passing by, leaving his two daughters with a passerby. Before he leapt—and this is the detail that killed me, inspiring a rather disappointingly middling poem—he remarked to the passerby entrusted with his children: "Tell my daughters Daddy will be OK." I seem to remember Donald Trump giving him a check for a $1,000 (or $10,000?) and Bloomberg a medal. A few weeks ago, Law & Order, a little late to the party, crossed Autrey with a quasi-Bernie Goetz in the form of a white accountant in Harlem who killed two young black assailants ostensibly robbing his office. Elliot Gould, I hadn't seen him in anything in ages! I was beginning to think he had died.
But I digress: though lacking the same dramatic flair, not to mention the public recognition, this one will probably inspire a poem, too. I like understatement, after all—not to mention the promise of persuasive rhetoric. I wonder what he said exactly.
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