Our question about issues on the N/Q line that led to delays for N/Q/R/W trains yesterday morning - and cryptic MTA announcements about a "sick passenger" and then "a sick passenger" plus "a police investigation" - was answered in an unexpected way by the NY Times: It turns out that a man was found dead on a Q train at 7:11AM. Yikes. Police believe that Eugene Reilly, a postal handler who was coming from night the 4PM-12:30AM shift at the Ninth Avenue Processing Center, died sometime after boarding a Q train around 1AM to go back home to Brooklyn. The NY Times says that Reilly may have been dead for hours before being found yesterday morning since the ride to his home in Midwood takes about 35 minutes - and that he "could have traveled back and forth on the line six times before someone realized he had died." Oh, dear. People do fall asleep on the train - and when we see someone sleeping, we don't think, "Is he dead?" - we just think, "Well, he might miss his stop." Gothamist wonders how people determined that he was dead - perhaps he was in a train car with the conductor who noticed he'd been there for a while? The NY Times says that Reilly was overweight and did have heart issue; and then there was this heartbreaking quote from his wife: "I didn't even get to say goodbye to him."
See the Q Train's route
UPDATE [Jake]: does this remind anyone else of the story Tom Cruise tells in Collateral? Here is a quote from the script:
VINCENT
17 million people. This was a country, it would be the fifth biggest economy in the world. But nobody knows each other. Too impersonal. *
But that's just me...you know... *
I read about this guy. Gets on the MTA, here, and dies. Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices. This corpse doing laps around LA, people on and off, sitting next to him, nobody notices.
MAX
I see your point. Yeah...
