Uniformed and plainclothes police officers stand outside a New York subway station after a man was killed after falling into the path of a train, Monday, Dec. 3, 2012. Transit officials say police are investigating whether he could have been pushed onto the tracks. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
The sickening, rubber-necking front page story on the New York Post.
Imagine how this man's family feels.
By Ryan Ngala
[Times Square, New York] Since the day after the incident on Monday evening, the suspect no one has been arrested. Police are investigating the tragedy and are asking the question, ‘Who would do something like this?’ But as the police officers are continuing to pursue this case determined to track down the subway murderer who pushed the victim on to the tracks.
Police last night were questioning one suspect thought to have pushed the 58-year-old Queens father to his death, officials said. The incident was broadcast over the news and throughout the media; it also appeared on the front page of the New York Post. A suspect was identified and taken into custody on Tuesday after investigators recovered security video that showed a man fitting the description of the suspect; he had been working with street vendors near Rockefeller Center, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
When the accident occurred on Monday afternoon, witnesses told investigators they had seen the suspect talking to himself before he approached the victim, Ki-Suck Han at the Times Square station. The two got into an altercation, and the suspect pushed Han into the train's path.
Was anyone brave enough to save Han before he died on the tracks? Unfortunately there were no heroes who came forward to save him in the 22 seconds before the train struck. The NY Post published a photo of the victim on its front page. Han was depicted with his head turned toward the train, his arms were reaching up, but he was unable to climb off the tracks in time.
Freelance photographer R. Umar Abbasi, who was waiting to catch a train, was interviewed on NBC’s “Today” show on Wednesday. He told reporters that he wasn’t trying to take a photo of the victim, but that he was trying to alert the motorman of the approaching train by flashing his camera. "It took me a second to figure out what was happening ... I saw the lights in the distance. My mind was to alert the train," Abbasi said. "The people who were standing close to him ... they could have moved and grabbed him and pulled him up. No one made an effort," he added.
Soon after the incident, several other news media networks chimed in on the controversy. Many readers questioned why the photograph had been taken and published as the front cover of the New York Post newspaper.
“I'm sorry. Somebody's on the tracks. That's not going to help,” said Al Roker on NBC’s “Today” show as the photo was displayed.
Larry King reached out to followers on Twitter to ask this question:
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien tweeted: “I think it's terribly disturbing — imagine if that were your father or brother.”
The NY Post declined to share the photo with the Associated Press for distribution. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday that he believed that "in this case, it appeared to be a psychiatric problem", and he said of Han, “if I understand it, tried to break up a fight or something and paid for it with his life."
As the case developed and the police tracked down the Times Square subway murderer, it was revealed that he was a homeless drifter. He was arrested and charged this morning for allegedly tossing the victim onto the tracks where he was fatally crushed by the Q train. The perpetrator is Naeem Davis; he is in his thirties, and he confessed yesterday that he did push Ki-Suk Han. He told police that he “stayed and watched” as the train hit Han, but he had showed no remorse for what he did, another source said.
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