Fatal Subway Attack Caught on Film by NY Post Photographer – Should the Paper Have Published the Photo of a Man About to Die? [POLL]

The news adage some have used for years still holds true.

“If it bleeds, it leads!”

And that’s pretty much the standard by which the NY Post lives by to sell newspapers.

But, should they have published on their front page a man who had been thrown down to the subway tracks in front on an oncoming train seconds before being hit by the train and dying?

Common decency would tell you “no!”

But the images were recorded by a freelance NY Post photographer who claims to have been shooting his flash at the oncoming train to get the motorman’s attention in order for him to stop it on time.

You don’t have to look at the pictures…but knowing they’re out they’re out there still stirs your morbid curiosity to look.

Still, wouldn’t they have been better served by another photo?

For their purposes, no…because it’s the standard we’ve come to expect of the Post.

But other news organizations have, through the years, subjected us to pretty much the same thing!

Images of brutality in Viet Nam; the horror of planes plowing into the World Trade Center, and the subsequent images in the pages of Time Magazine of people jumping to their deaths from the upper floors of the towers.

Hence, as much as I’d like to fault the Post for their judgment in displaying the image, they’re not the first…they won’t be the last!

Here’s another point.

Instead of flashing away as the photographer did, why didn’t he and some others just standing around attempt to help the guy onto the platform?

We’ll never know.

Here’s the link to the story, along with the front page headline in question.

Cops today are questioning a man who might be the subway psycho who “launched” an innocent Queens dad into tracks, where he was killed by an oncoming Q train, law enforcement sources told The Post.

The suspect was being questioned today in Manhattan, in connection to the grisly death of Ki Suk Han, 58, yesterday afternoon.

The Elmhurst man desperately tried to scramble back to the platform as onlookers screamed, shouted and frantically waved their hands and bags in a bid to get the downtown Q train to stop at around 12:30 p.m.

Post freelance photographer R. Umar Abbasi — who had been waiting on the platform of the 49th Street station — ran toward the train, repeatedly firing off his flash to warn the operator.

“I just started running, running, hoping that the driver could see my flash,” said Abbasi, whose camera captured chilling shots of Suk’s tragic fight for his life.
The train slowed, but a dazed and bruised Han still wound up hopelessly caught between it and the platform as it came to a halt.

A shaken Abbasi said the train “crushed him like a rag doll.”

“It's one of those great tragedies, it's a blot on all of us,” Mayor Bloomberg said today. “And if you could do anything to stop it, you would. But the good news is it happens phenomenally rarely.”

(My own aside….as for Mayor Bloomberg, what a dildo thing to say! It happens often enough to make anyone using the subway always be cognizant of who’s standing next to them.)

The horrific drama unfolded after Han approached the crazed man — who police sources described as a panhandler and witnesses said had been harassing and cursing at straphangers — on the southbound platform and tried to calm him down.

As other riders congregated toward one end of the platform, Han and the man were about 100 feet away from them.

“He went up and tried to calm him down, saying, ‘You’re scaring people,’ ” a law-enforcement source said. “The emotionally disturbed guy just started screaming and cursing, saying, ‘You don’t know me! You don’t know who I am!’ ”

As the train’s arrival was announced over the loudspeaker, the attacker “just grabbed [Han] and launched him — just threw him — straight onto the tracks,” a witness said.

The killer then grabbed a paper coffee cup he used to collect change — which he’d put down before the assault — and fled.

Abbasi recalled, “Out of the periphery of my eye, I just saw a body flying, flying through the air.

“People started waving their hands, anything they could find. They were shouting to the man in the tracks, “Get out! Get out of there!’ ”

Han barely missed the third rail, cops said, and looked stunned as he sat up in the track bed as the train approached before scrambling to his feet.

At one point, Han stood in the tracks and looked directly at the oncoming train lights.

“The most painful part was I could see him getting closer to the edge. He was getting so close,” Abbasi said. “And people were running toward him and the train.
“I didn’t think about [the perp] until after. In that moment, I just wanted to warn the train — to try and save a life.”

Abbasi said the driver saw his camera flashing but told him he couldn’t stop the train fast enough.