Pete Donohue, Rocco Parascandola and Samuel Goldsmith, staff writers with the Daily News, have tracked down the man responsible for pulling the emergency brake on the D train on Saturday. Although police credited the one-minute delay caused by the brake with helping them secure the 53rd St. station following Dwight Johnson’s murder, officials warned against pulling the brake as it often delays emergency response teams. Furthermore, as the Daily News editorial writers note today, pulling the cord creates an “isolated death trap” in the middle of a dark tunnel.
Still, Vincent Martinez’s story is illuminating. He says that alleged killer Gerardo Sanchez kept yelling at Johnson, “You should have let me sit down” and that Johnson did not punch Sanchez, as was originally reported. Martinez, a security guard, first tried to knock on the door of the train driver’s cab, but when the driver refused to come out, he pulled the emergency brake instead. Later, Martinez told police that he did not know who pulled the brake and that he didn’t see anything. He says he didn’t want to get arrested for pulling the brake cord after the motorman told Martinez that he should not have pulled the cord. It sounds as though this D train on Saturday morning was a gruesome and bloody scene for those 30 people in the car with Sanchez and Johnson.
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The statements from the police and MTA that pulling the emergency cord was out of line strike me as bizarre. Do they really believe that people A: know what the cord does and B: understand the usage guidelines for it?
It seems to me that there are few bigger emergencies than a murder in the subway. Under those extremely frightening circumstances, if something says “emergency” I am going to pull it, not stand around thinking about the emergency cord usage guidelines.
Well, when the guidelines are posted directly next to the cords and specifically, in red lettering, state DO NOT PULL next to “Police”, “Fire”, and “Medical” symbols, I’d say there is less of an excuse…It is also completely inexcusable that this guy didn’t come forward right away and say what happened.
Give the guy a break here. He just watched someone get stabbed to death and the murderer seemingly went into some kind of trance afterwards. I have a feeling everyone was pretty shaken up.
While the security guard might have done the wrong thing by pulling the cord then denying it, it was surely not “inexcusable.” The guy was clearly frazzled after seeing what he saw. Good enough excuse for me.
i wonder if someone gets murdered in you face you will have time to read the letting in red
This story is so frightening on so many levels, and there is no easy answer to what could/should riders, the police and NYC Transit do in such a situation.
Only lesson I can find is: Give up your seats, folks. (I am not kidding.)
From what I’ve read, what they’re saying the passengers should have done is get as far away from the murderer as possible, get off at the next stop, and notify police of exactly what happened.
If there had been a working intercom on that car (I don’t think those cars have them, from what I’ve heard) they should have used that to contact the driver and/or conductor. But the brake should not have been pulled. That kind of trapped everyone involved (literally and figuratively) into only a small set of options.
if the brake wasn’t pulled, how would any authorities have been alerted. there doesn’t seem like a practical alternative. The man’s a hero
Well, nobody has to follow the guidelines exactly.
Of course the thing is, what the emergency brake does is STOP THE TRAIN, so the idea there really is to stop the train from dragging someone along the platform, or maybe to prevent a derailment, althouigh the latetr is really the motorman’s job.
As it is, in this case, pulling the emergency brake didn’t do any harm and could have been of some help.
There is the argument is that this delays medical help – but…
The train was delayed by only one minute in getting into the station. This was not a big delay in getting help – and in fact actually it speeded it up. Till the brake was pulled, the motorman was doing nothing besides moving the train. He was not alerting anybody. Once the train stopped, he called police – and presumably that’s aso about when when paramedics weer called. So they got there faster actually.
The only problem was that Dwight Johnson needed a lot more help than paramedics could give. I don’t know if even a Armed Forces emergency trauma team like what they have in Iraq could have helped him.
Having or not having an an intercom was not an issue in this case, since they were in the same car as the motorman. (A lot of people sometimes gare in the forst car because that might be closest to an exit) Martrinez was banging on the motorman’s cab. That doesn’t mean the motorman didn’t know there was a problem.
A more important question is – couldn’t this trap people in the same car as the murderer? In this case it maybe helped. As soon as the train stopped, the murderer knew he would be caught – but he still had a little hope of escaping identification, so he became less aggressive and not more. He managed to push the knife through the doors and then mingled like he was one of the others. (This part isn’t clear but maybe he was near the victime and people who had run away now came close either to help the victim or to prevent him from escaping.)
Martinez’ motive had been to stop the stabber from leaving at the next stop. The Daily news says taht mayor Bloomberg defended pulling teh emergency brake but what he actually defended was the police keeping the doors closed after the train arrived in the station. Had the not stopped thr tain though the motorman would not have made a call before he pulled into the station – and — I don;’t know – would the motorman have kept the doors closed. The thing is, the motorman knew.
In other circumstances you would not want the doors to stay closed but it is probably standard police procedure now, virtually written in stone, taht the doors shuld always be klept closed while a perpetrator like this is inside because uit wouldn;t be safe for the police (and othwers not currently in danger) to just let him out.
There is no one right course for all situations.
If this happened in the rear of the train there would have been a substantial delay. The Motorman would have to walk through all those cars to investigate the cause.
What if the guy kept stabbing other people?
Pulling the brake is a bad idea.
Yeah, I dunno what the “right” thing to do was in this situation. All I can say is, I don’t fault the guy for pulling the cord at all. In split-second situations like this, you don’t have time to think, “Oh, is it right to pull the cord?”
For anyone looking for the article referenced above, here it is:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new.....es_on.html
I certainly don’t blame the guy for pulling the emergency cord after he tried to get the motorman’s attention. He was left with only bad and worse options at that point. I don’t know if chose the bad or worse option, but I think the motorman may have been more to blame for the emergency cord.