12-9 on the tracks

talk about beat explorin'.

so i was on my way back from a day hitting up the fulton area business alliance office and the social service agencies in bed stuy, thinkin i got some pretty good leads..

and i'm on the C train going toward manhattan and we were coming into the nostrand ave. stop when we screech to a halt and the train operators start yelling at each other over the intercom. "12-9!" one of 'em says, and the other one goes "what's going on?!?"

everyone in the train just looks at each other like what the fuck? and the lady across from me says 12-9 means someone fell on the tracks. then an MTA employee runs in our car and over to the front left side. the dude was trapped there. right there.. under the car i was sitting in.

i said "holy fuck" and start freaking out a little because i think about that stuff happening but never think it's actually going to happen. i read a story when i worked at the brooklyn paper about a girl with a prosthetic leg that fell trying to move between cars on the N and got run over by 10 cars before the driver realized what was going on. they fired that guy. that story haunts me.

and now this? then they cut the lights. a bunch of people were moving into our car, and they weren't opening our doors and we had been in there for a few minutes, and everyone was crowding in to try to see the body. we were right in the heart of bed-stuy.

so finally they let us out and there are cops everywhere and i kind of walk away for a second and then i think... yo. i'm a JOURNALIST. aren't i supposed to be covering shit like this? so i emailed my professor and started snapping photos and my queasiness turned into... a goal.

one cop wouldn't let me back down into the station so i crossed the street and sweet-talked the other cop... then when i came back up both of 'em were standing together. they called me lois lane.

word around the street was the guy jumped. but we didn't print that. i couldn't get to any witnesses who were standing on the platform. and i don't know if the guy was okay or not, but they took him to king's county.

wild day. now i got more homework.