14 DAY TRIAL // 30-year-old Naeem Davis has been identified as a suspect in the Q train push incident in Manhattan. Davis confesses to launching a man off the platform, which lead to the victim's death.
The incident, which we described earlier, occurred on Monday, December 3. 58-year-old Ki Suk Han, in the 49th street Times Square subway station. Han was a father, and lived in Elmherst, Queens. He was in town to renew his Korean passport.
Following an argument with Davis, he was pushed off the tracks by a then unidentified African American man. Police pulled CCTV footage from the station and identified the attacker as a street vendor from Queens.
The NY Post reports that Davis confessed to pushing Han, according to a law enforcement source. Yesterday, officials had stated that he implicated himself in the crime. Witnesses told police that they noticed the suspect talking to himself, in the moments leading to that decisive push.
The incident shook up New York residents, and a massive search was started for the mysterious suspect. An officer who was in his coffee break apprehended him on 50th Street near Seventh Avenue, at 1:30 p.m. yesterday.
“It's one of those great tragedies, it's a blot on all of us. [...] And if you could do anything to stop it, you would. But the good news is it happens phenomenally rarely,” Mayor Bloomberg reacted in a statement issued today.
The train “crushed him like a rag doll,” freelance photographer for the NY Post R. Umar Abbasi, who was at the scene, says.
A resident at Beth Israel Medical Center also found herself in the subway station, and tried to perform CPR on the victim.
“There was no pulse, never, no reflexes,” Dr. Laura Kaplan recalls.
“I heard what I thought were heart sounds. [...] We started compressions, which is half of CPR. We were unable to perform rescue breathing [the other half of CPR] because there was blood coming out of his mouth. He wasn’t in the right position [for full CPR] and there was just no way to get him out of there,” she adds.