An unemployed Brooklyn man on his way to a job interview became a hero Tuesday when he rescued a baby who'd fallen onto the train tracks.
Delroy Simmonds was waiting for the J train at the elevated Van Siclen stop in Brooklyn when a gust of wind pushed a baby stroller, and the nine-month old boy strapped inside, onto the tracks. In the near distance, a train was roaring towards the station.
The mother, who had three other children in tow, was "frozen with shock" witnesses told The Daily News.
Simmonds, a father of two, sprung into action, jumping onto the tracks and hoisting the stroller back onto the platform, before managing to lift himself up to safety.
“The train was seconds away," 21-year-old witness Khalima Ansari said. "The driver was honking the horn and then stopped seconds before it got to them.”
“He’s a hero, no doubt about it,” she said of Simmonds.
The baby boy suffered a gash to his forehead and was taken to the hospital.
Simmonds downplayed his act of courage.
“Everybody is making me out to be some sort of superhero,” he told The Daily News. “I’m just a normal person. Anybody in that situation should have done what I did.”
Simmonds missed the job interview.
"What I really need is a job," he said.
(Please, someone give this guy a job.)
The incident recalls a similar story in Australia. A mother can be seen in a video (see below) looking away for a brief second while her baby stroller suddenly rolls of the tracks into the path of an oncoming train. The mother collapses in despair. Miraculously, however, the train pushed the stroller 130 feet before stopping and the baby was not hurt.
In 2011 in New York, 146 people were struck by trains. 47 were killed.
[UPDATE!] Talk about good karma! After a year of unemployment, Delroy Simmonds has been HIRED as a new maintenance worker at Terminal 3 of JFK airport. After story of his heroics broke, he received numerous job offers but decided on the gig at JFK, The Daily News reports, where he'll be paid $9.50 an hour, which is two dollars more than the starting salary for normal new hires. “It says a lot about his character that he would jump on the tracks to save a (child),” Guy Rodriguez, who hired Simmonds, tells the News. Yes, yes it does. Congrats Delroy!