UPPER WEST SIDE— A ballet dancer saved a man who was shoved onto the subway tracks at 72nd Street late Saturday evening, according to police and news reports.
Gray Davis, a 31-year-old dancer with the American Ballet Theater, leaped onto the tracks to rescue a 58-year-old man on June 3 around 11:20 p.m., according to police and The New York Times.
“At first I waited for somebody else to jump down there,” Davis told the paper in a phone interview. “People were screaming to get help. But nobody jumped down. So I jumped down.”
Carolyn Mack, 23, is facing an attempted murder charge for pushing the victim, who suffered a head injury, according to police and court records.
Mack got into a scuffle with the man prior to the incident, according to witnesses. Mack tried to escape but was chased down and caught by Good Samaritans who cornered her in front of Utopia Restaurant, near 72nd and Amsterdam Avenue, until police officers arrived, according to video of the incident.
“Are you serious?” Mack repeated to police as they cuffed her, according to the video, before it took roughly five police officers place her in a patrol car.
Davis had been standing on the subway platform with his mother, who sent him to call for help after witnessing the man and woman fight and the woman shove the victim on the tracks, she recounted the incident in a Facebook post.
But as she watched the victim struggle, she didn't even realize her son had leaped down to help him, she wrote.
“out of no where and just in time we all watched as a brave young man jumped down, and lifted the man high up on to safety like he was a feather. Shocked, I said, uh, Cassie is THAT Grayson Davis ? She said Yes it is. He then lifted himself up miraculously just before the train got there. People started cheering and yelling "you are a hero"," Davis' mother, ABT corps member Janie Krabbe B. LeTourneau, wrote on Facebook. "My son has always made me proud, but I've never been as proud of him as I was tonight, out of 2 full platforms of people, he was the only person brave enough to jump down and save that man's life. This certainly is a day I will never forget in more ways than one. (Did I mention Gray has been recovering from a herniated disc for the last month?)"
Davis cited his ballet skills as part of the way he was able to leap out of the tracks before being injured.
“I never realized how high it was. Luckily, I’m a ballet dancer, so I swung my leg up,” he told the paper.
The victim suffered lacerations to his head and was treated at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital.
Mack was charged with two assault charges as well as first-degree reckless endangerment, according to court records.
