An MTA track worker dragged to his death early Wednesday beneath a passing Manhattan subway train was only days from marking his first anniversary on the job, a union official said.
Hilarion Joseph, 57, was working as a flagger for a track-work crew about 150 feet south of the 34th St.-Herald Square station when an in-service uptown D train running on the express track rolled past about 12:20 a.m. The train somehow snagged the father of six and dragged him under the wheels as his co-workers cleaned up trash from the tracks, sources said.
“He was fairly new,” the victim’s oldest son, Japeri Smith, 24, told the Daily News. “He loved the job. He wanted to make a career working there. … He was a great person, a veteran. He was from Trinidad. He was a father, an uncle, someone who everyone loved.”
John Chiarello, secretary-treasurer and director of safety for Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, said Joseph was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital only days before his probationary period was set to end.
“This development has shaken our union,” said Chiarello. “This incident serves as a stark reminder of the challenges our members face each and every day.”
Flaggers are responsible for alerting oncoming trains to track work further down the line.
Joseph’s family learning of his death in a 1 a.m. phone call from police.
“That was around his normal shift,” said Smith. “He usually gets ready and leaves around 8 p.m. to get to work for 9 p.m. and works until 6 in the morning. … He was a godly and family man.”
Cops and MTA officials were investigating the possibility that an article of the worker’s clothing was caught by the passing train before Joseph was pulled to his death, a source said.
“Whether there was not enough clearance, whether he stumbled, we don’t know,'” said NYC Transit President Richard Davey. “Obviously, a flagger shouldn’t under any circumstances be coming into contact with the train, but he did. We’ll talk to the dispatchers, we’ll look at the equipment itself to make sure it was functioning appropriately.”
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said the tragedy was “very much still under investigation on what went wrong.”
“There was work taking place, scheduled work. The fellow was flagging,” Lieber said at a Wednesday morning meeting of the MTA Board Safety Committee. “Our folks were at the hospital last night with the worker’s family. Obviously they’re very much in our thoughts right now.”
The front cars of the train had arrived at the Herald Square station when the emergency brake was pulled, a source said. Riders were able to walk to the front and exit onto the platform as medics rushed the severely injured employee to Bellevue.
Joseph died there less than an hour later, cops said. All nonessential track work was suspended Wednesday after the fatality.
A train traveling through such a work zone would have been going about 10 to 15 mph, said Demetrius Crichlow, head of subways for the MTA.
Davey asked those at Wednesday’s MTA meeting to observe a moment of silence for Joseph.
“These are dangerous jobs that we ask our people to do day in and day out,” he said.
A department bulletin obtained by the Daily News showed the MTA ordered all track workers to attend an eight-hour special safety briefing “on track flagging and track safety commencing [Wednesday].”
