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New York lauds rescues of man, toddler

Julio Gonzalez, left, and Pedro Nevarez, right, caught a three-year-old after he fell four stories from a fire escape in New York on Thursday. The child suffered only minor injuries. PHOTO: AP

Quick-thinking New Yorkers gave the city an amazing front seat on heroism in the first week of the new year, snatching a falling toddler out of midair and jumping onto a subway track to save a man.

Wesley Autrey, 50, took the top prize for bravery, leaping onto a film student who had suffered a seizure and fallen onto the tracks of New York's metro system.

Autrey was at the 137th Street and Broadway subway station in Manhattan on Tuesday with daughters Shuqui, six, and Syshe, four, when he saw Cameron Hollopeter collapse onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train.

After handing the children to an adult on the platform, the construction worker jumped into the train well, pulled Hallopeter's body inside the tracks and pressed it down with his own in the 33cm or so of clearance room.

The bottom of an incoming train grazed his hat, he later told reporters.

When the train stopped, he yelled: "We're OK down here, but I've got two daughters up there. Let them know their father's OK," New York media reported.

While Autrey was becoming the toast of town and country, making guest appearances on talk shows on Thursday, a pair of friends were examining a second-hand Honda in the Bronx, considering a sale.

Pedro Nevarez, 40, and Julio Gonzalez, 43, heard a scream, looked up and saw three-year-old Timothy Addo hanging onto an iron fire escape 13m in the air.

The two men tried racing up the stairs and into the apartment, but the door was locked, and they couldn't grab hold of the fire escape, the New York Times reported.

They ran back into position with outstretched arms just in time to catch the 19.5kg toddler as he let go.

"He knocked me right out of my shoes," Nevarez was quoted as saying.

Gonzalez said the child bounced off his friend and "fell into my lap. He knocked my `brother' down and he knocked me down. But we caught him. He did not ever hit the floor."

The child had crawled out on the fire escape after a babysitter had forgotten to close a window after smoking a cigarette.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the two rescues proved that New York City was not an impersonal place where people don't care about each other.

"This is a week of heroes here in New York," he said.

The heroes, however, were modest about their rescues.

Nevarez, who said he had one foster son, said he did "what any other father would do."

"When you're a father, you would do this whether it's your child or not," Gonzalez was quoted as saying.

Autrey received the city's top civic award -- a bronze medal, 10,000 dollars from Donald Trump, a free trip to Disney World, and a year's free pass for riding the subway.

Some onlookers thought Autrey should have gotten a lifetime free pass on the New York metro system for what he did.

Still, Autrey, a veteran of the US military, dismisses the idea that he's a hero.

"I'm not looking at this like I'm the hero," Autrey said at the presentation by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"What I did was something that any and every New Yorker should do, you know what I'm saying? You see somebody in distress, do the right thing. You know? Help out," he said.

"We got guys and girls overseas dying for us to have our freedoms," Autrey said. "We got to show each other some love."
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