CU Employee Saves Life Across Subway Tracks

He was standing in the 116th Street subway station, waiting for the downtown 1 train, when screams for help rang from panicked commuters on the opposite platform—a man had fallen onto the uptown tracks. Without thinking, Veeramuthu Kalimuthu climbed down to help.

“I wasn’t afraid,” Kalimuthu said of his March 14 rescue. When Kalimuthu, or “Kali,” an assistant mechanic for Columbia Facilities, heard the cries for help he jumped onto the downtown tracks, walked quickly across—careful to avoid contact with the high-voltage electrified rails—and helped to hoist the unconscious man up to the platform, before turning, walking back across the tracks and up onto the downtown platform, to catch his train.

Lifting the man—a “dead weight,” according to witnesses—was not an easy task for Kalimuthu, who stands 5’5” and weighs 150 pounds. “He was kind of a heavy guy,” Kalimuthu said. “I put him on my shoulder and put my two hands on his two legs, and lifted him up. I couldn’t get him onto the platform. There were two gentlemen—I had to push him up, and they grabbed him and put him on the platform.”

Less than a minute later, an uptown train arrived, rushing over the spot where the man had been.

Following the rescue, Kalimuthu boarded his own train, removed his soiled jacket, which “was kind of muddy and smelly,” he said, and continued to his home in Jamaica, Queens.

When he got there, he faced a second challenge: convincing his family of what had happened. “I told my wife, she didn’t believe me,” he said. “Then I told my son, he didn’t believe me. I told my daughter, she didn’t believe me.”

But the story, which bears striking similarities to the much-publicized actions of Wesley Autrey in January 2007, came out quickly, as one of the witnesses on the uptown platform was Kalimuthu’s colleague, Columbia mechanic Marcus Santos. Kalimuthu began receiving interview requests, and his actions were publicized in media outlets from the New York Daily News to CBS to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.

The man, identified as a 46-year-old New Jersey resident named Daniel, suffered several fractures from his fall, and was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital for treatment. Released Thursday, he told the media that he was drunk when the incident happened.

Daniel expressed interest in meeting Kalimuthu once he recovers from his injuries.

“It’s instinct,” Kalimuthu said of his actions. “I want to get to this guy as fast as I can to get him out of danger. I wasn’t thinking about anything until I was on the F train, and then I think what I just did.”

maggie.astor@columbiaspectator.com