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Officer saves woman who fell onto metro tracks
By Deborah Young
Staten Island Advance
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Sgt. Kenneth Granowski could tell something was wrong the second he stepped onto the platform yesterday at the Great Kills station of the Staten Island Railway to catch the 6:49 a.m. express to the ferry, en route to his job at One Police Plaza.
A crowd of about 30 people had gathered to peer over at the Tottenville-bound side, where a man in jeans and a Mets jacket was lying flat, belly-up on the tracks.
Another commuter, he said, already had crossed the bridge and was pacing back and forth, seemingly desperate to get the man to safety before a train came churning into the station.
For the 14-year member of the force, trained to assess a situation and snap into action, there was no sitting back to think about what to do.
“I yelled, ‘Just give me a second, I’ll be right over,’” said Granowski, 33, of Great Kills, to the anonymous Good Samaritan.
“You never know when a train is going to be coming from Tottenville at that time of the morning,” the policeman noted.
The lifelong South Shore resident pounded up the stairs and over the pedestrian bridge. As he ran, he pulled out his cell phone, called 911, identified himself as an off-duty officer and described the scene.
Approaching the platform, he saw the man, who looked to be in his early 50s, with his leg splayed awkwardly.
“You could tell he was in pain,” said the sergeant.
He and the other commuter - a thirtysomething man dressed in a neat brown suit - then called out to the victim, cajoling him to hobble toward them.
“We were able to get him to a point where we were able to grab his jacket,” said Granowski. "(We) were able to lift him up onto the platform. As he was coming up, we grabbed his belt and pulled him where it was safe.”
It was only a few minutes after they had placed the man on the platform that a train came speeding past, he said.
The man, later identified by police sources as Joseph Ruggiero, 52, of Great Kills, told them he had slipped. He was taken to Staten Island University Hospital, Ocean Breeze, with a possible broken ankle.
Shrugging off the feat as a natural part of being a cop, Granowski said: “We’re police officers 24 hours a day, we’re here to protect and serve and 24 hours we’re on duty.”
But as for the anonymous hero in the brown suit, who hopped the next St. George-bound train before the sergeant could even get his name or shake his hand, he said: “We would need more civilians like that. There would have been no way I could have gotten up without his help.”
Copyright 2009 Staten Island Advance