Heroic straphanger saves two from oncoming subway train

It was double the trouble and terror — with twice the reward.

Tiny Doreen Winkler miraculously helped yank two men from the path of an oncoming subway train on Thursday night after things went bad for a good Samaritan in the Bowling Green subway station.
“Thank you, I thought I was going to die,” one of the death-defying duo told Winkler as they hugged on the platform after the near-miss.
The grateful would-be rescuer had jumped from the platform at her urging Thursday night after a drunken drifter fell to the tracks.
The 5-foot-2 Brooklynite wept Friday when recounting her adrenalized effort as visions of this week’s fatal subway shove ran through her head.
“I had one arm each of each man,” she told the Daily News. “I was freaking out that nobody was helping at first.”
Her heroics elicited applause from fellow straphangers — mere seconds after the lower Manhattan subway station echoed with screams and gasps of horror.
“You can’t ever, ever, ever watch somebody die,” said Winkler, who moved to New York four years ago from Hamburg, Germany.
Winkler said she couldn’t shake the image of Ki-Suck Han, 58, pushed into the path of an oncoming train Monday afternoon in midtown. The Korean immigrant was killed before anyone could come to his aid.
“Not again,” she said. “The whole time in my head, not again. I kept thinking I’m going to watch him die.”
The terrifying incident occurred as Winkler was waiting for a train to an uptown wine tasting just before 10 p.m.
She heard an odd noise and spotted the apparently drunken man laying on his back in the middle of the tracks. “Help him! Help him!” shouted frantic straphangers on the other side of the station.
Winkler, afraid she couldn’t lug the bigger man to safety alone, encouraged a man standing nearby to jump down for a rescue try.
“This guy jumps down on the tracks,” recalled Winkler. “And he’s pushing him, trying to get him to stand up.”
Witness Margaret Besheer said the panic in the station escalated when the second man landed on the tracks — and the northbound train suddenly appeared.
“I glanced up and see the lights of an approaching train on the uptown side, and glance back and now there are TWO people on the tracks,” recounted the Voice of America correspondent.
The unidentified rescuer and his drunken target managed to reach the platform, where Winkler — with the help of two other women — pulled the pair to safety.
“It all happened so fast,” said Besheer.
Thank God this had a happy ending.”
The first person on the tracks was later identified as Jack Simmons, a homeless man formerly of the South Bronx. Witnesses said he appeared boozy and dazed before tumbling from the platform.
“He’s a drifter,” said a relative. “I hope he’s OK. I don’t know what to tell you.”
Simmons, 64, was treated and released at New York Downtown Hospital, police sources said. He told cops that he was slightly intoxicated before slipping onto the tracks.
Hero Winkler wound up riding the train back home after her daring effort.
“This is not about attention ... it’s about what everybody should do,” she said. “I don’t understand how people can just stand there and watch and not help.”
-With Pete Donohue