When Ramiro Ocasio left work on Friday, he was thinking about what he was going to do over the Martin Luther King weekend, and whether or not his beloved New England Patriots would be able to overcome the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday to get to the Super Bowl.
The last thing on the 33-year-old Kirkland & Ellis records assistant’s mind was that he’d have to risk life and limb in order to save an elderly man from being the latest victim in a shocking string of subway fatalities in New York City.
Ordinarily, Ocasio would have still been at work, but the New York office of Kirkland let everyone leave at 3:00 P.M. that day so they could get a jump on the long weekend. Ocasio, who had previously worked at King & Spalding, joined Kirkland after his friend, attorney Robert Rizzo, lateraled to Kirkland from King & Spalding in 2005.
On Friday, Ocasio was waiting on the platform of the N/R station at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue for the train to take him to his home in Astoria, Queens. The Kirkland staffer was listening to music through earbuds and cranking his head impatiently toward the dark tunnel, when, all of a sudden, he heard a commotion loud enough to divert his attention away from his music. Ocasio looked onto the subway tracks and saw an elderly man struggling to stand up. (The man’s name and identify have not been publicly disclosed.)
“He seemed disoriented,” says Ocasio, who estimates that the man was between 70 and 75 years of age and weighed about 120 to 130 pounds. “People were yelling at him to get close to the platform, but he seemed out of it.”
Ocasio quickly realized that the man was in danger, so he sprung into action without hesitation. He took out his earbuds, dropped his backpack, placed his wallet containing more than $300 on the platform’s edge, and jumped into the dark, dank, river of sewage water and garbage that serves as home to a large number of New York City’s rats. “All I know is that it’s really dark down there,” says Ocasio. “You feel like you’re in a dungeon.”
Because of the way the tunnel is shaped in that particular station, Ocasio couldn’t see exactly where the train was. “The tunnel coming into the station is curved, so you can’t see the train coming until it’s almost at the station,” says Ocasio.
