The photographer whose picture of a man just before he was killed by a New York subway has set off a storm of outrage said Wednesday he was too far away to help rescue the victim.
R. Umar Abassi, whose photograph ran under the headline “Doomed” on the front page of the New York Post Tuesday, said he was several hundred feet away when he saw Ki-suk Han hurled onto the train tracks.
“If this thing happened again with the same circumstances, whether I had a camera or not, and I was running towards it, there is no way I could have rescued Mr Han,” Abassi said in an interview with NBC television.
“What really surprises me is the people who were maybe 100 feet or 150 feet away from Mr Han, they did not reach out to help him,’ he said.
A freelance photographer for the Post, Abassi acknowledged he sold the photograph but insisted he was using the camera’s flash to try to alert the subway’s driver.
“I can’t let the armchair critics bother me. They were not there. They have no idea how very quickly it happened,” he told the Post.
Han, 58, was flung onto the train tracks by a deranged man following an altercation. The incident occurred Monday at a station near Times Square.
Abassi estimated that some 22 seconds elapsed from when he saw “a body fly off onto the tracks” and the train hit Han who had scrambled to the edge of the platform but was unable to lift himself out.
“Twenty-two seconds is a long time but in this process while I am running, the person who pushed him is coming towards me, and there’s a lapse in there where I brace myself with my back to the wall because I don’t want to be pushed onto the platform,” he told NBC.
But readers slammed the Post’s photographer and editors for what they saw as a callous attitude to the tragedy.
“Wow! enough time to take a few pictures. Why didn’t the person help? How many pictures did they take? 3-4 pictures. And nobody tried to help. Not one person,” wrote Joseph Monte on the Post’s website.
Photographer too far away to save subway victim
