A sleeping subway passenger was kicked off a mid-evening train in New York City. Literally.
The incident occurred around 9 pm on Saturday night as Metropolitan Transit Authority (“MTA”) employees were attempting to clear the G train of passengers while at the slow-moving coach’s final stop.
@MTA Worker drags and kicks inebriated man on g train at church ave after he knocked him out the seat didn’t even wake em up just dragged em pic.twitter.com/PxE21Z46xX
— 808bmg (@c_oner) November 5, 2017
The G train operates to and from the Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods of Kensington and Long Island City, respectively. After most of the passengers had exited at the Church Avenue station in Kensington, a lone MTA employee began dragging a sleeping man along the floor. That’s where the video begins.
As the unidentified MTA worker drags the somnolent straphanger by the hood of his black sweater, a fellow passenger follows along the length of the train with his camera.
The transit worker pulls his soporific charge down the brown and grey-flecked linoleum of the ’80s-era R68 subway car and kicks him halfway upright, saying, “Come on! Get up there! I don’t got time for this shit!”
The once-sleeping man groggily complies as another MTA employee calls out off-camera, “Amigo, over here!”
Claude Harris is the fellow passenger who recorded the scene. In an interview with the New York Daily News he said he had attempted to wake the man as the train was idling at the last stop but left after the conductor announced the doors were about to close. Then, he said, the MTA employee started in on the man left asleep. Harris said:
He immediately grabs this guy, throws him down to the ground and starts to drag him … I’m not gonna judge this man to say he was drunk. I’m not gonna judge him to say he was homeless. He was just asleep. He wasn’t bothering anyone.
Since being posted on Monday night, the video has prompted an official investigation by the MTA. A statement released by MTA spokesman Shams Tarek reads, in part, “This footage is clearly disturbing and the employee in the video has been removed from service while the incident is being investigated.”
[image via screengrab]
Follow Colin Kalmbacher on Twitter: @colinkalmbacher
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