Subway Rescue Hero
Lisa Donath was running late. Heading down the sidewalk toward her subway stop in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood, she decided to skip her usual espresso. Donath, 25, had a lot to do at work, plus visitors on the way: Her parents were coming in for Thanksgiving from her hometown of Minneapolis. But as she hustled down the stairs and through the long tunnel, she started to feel uncomfortably warm. By the time she got to the platform, Donath felt faint-maybe it hadn't been a good idea to give blood the night before, she thought. She leaned heavily against a post close to the tracks.
Several yards away, Ismael "Mel" Feneque, 43, and his girlfriend, Melina Gonzalez, found a spot close to where the front of the train would stop. Feneque, a pattern maker, had a mound of sketches waiting for him in his studio, but on this morning, women's fashion was far from his mind. He and Gonzalez were deep in discussion about a house they were thinking of buying.
But when he heard the scream, followed by someone yelling, "Oh, my God, she fell in!" Feneque didn't hesitate. Yanking off the bag he had slung across his six-three frame, he jumped down to the tracks and ran some 40 feet toward the body sprawled facedown on the rails.
"No! Not you!" his girlfriend screamed after him.
She was right to be alarmed. By the time Feneque reached Donath, he could "feel the vibration on the tracks and see the light coming into the tunnel," he remembers. "The train was maybe 20 seconds from the station." In that instant, Feneque gave himself a mission: I'm going to get her out, and then I'm going to get myself out, ASAP. I'm not going to let myself get killed here.
Feneque, a former high school wrestler who trains at a gym to stay in shape, grabbed Donath under her armpits. She was deadweight. "It was hard to lift her. She was just out," he says. But he managed to raise her the four feet to the platform so that bystanders could grab her arms and drag her away from the edge. That's where Donath briefly regained consciousness, felt herself being pulled along the ground, and saw someone else holding her purse.
"I thought I'd been mugged," she says. She remembers the woman who held her hand and a man who gave his shirt to help stop the blood pouring from her head. And, she says, "I remember trying to talk and I couldn't, and that's when I realized how much pain I was in." The impact of her fall had been absorbed by her face-she'd lost teeth and suffered a broken eye socket, a broken jaw, and cuts all over her head.
But as the train closed in, Feneque wasn't finished. He still had to grab and hoist up a man and a teenager who'd hopped down to the tracks and then use all the strength he had left to lift himself onto the platform. He did so just seconds before the train barreled past him and came to a stop.
Police and fire officials soon arrived, and Feneque gave his name to an officer and told him the story. "He said that it was a great thing I had done, and I thanked him," Feneque recalls. Gonzalez says her unassuming boyfriend was calm on their 40-minute train ride downtown-just as he had been seconds after the rescue. Which, she says, made her think about her reaction at the time. "I saw the train coming and I was thinking he was going to die," she explains.
Donath's parents joined her at her hospital bedside by the next morning, which was also Thanksgiving, and stayed in town to see her through the series of surgeries she'd need to reconstruct her face. Once Donath returned to her job as a teen drug and alcohol counselor, two bystanders who'd helped her that day approached her independently on the subway and introduced themselves. But Donath was determined to find the man who had saved her life-the man the police had listed, incorrectly, as Feneque Ismael. "I was never really into going on TV or getting my picture put in the New York Times -- as you can imagine, having a scarred-up face isn't fun," says Donath. "But I did so to know that I tried everything I could [to contact him]."
Feneque, for his part, couldn't stop wondering what had happened to the woman on the tracks. He went on his own hunt, posting a message on a newspaper website asking if anyone knew whether the woman who'd fallen in the subway had survived. No one responded. Several weeks later, while surfing the Internet for any new clues Š bingo! A television station had posted an update on its website, detailing Donath's recovery and her search for her rescuer. Feneque e-mailed the address provided to say that he was that man.
When the two first met, Donath threw her arms around Feneque and wept. It was overwhelming, she says, to try to convey her feelings. "What do you say to the person who saved your life?" When they met again several months later, for this photo shoot, it felt a lot easier. "I finally had the chance to hear his side of the story in detail," she says. "He really just seems like such a sweet and humble person."
Feneque says there's no point in wondering why he was on the platform-at a different time from when he usually rides and at a station a considerable distance from his apartment-at the moment Donath needed help. "Whether it was pure coincidence or sent from above, who's to say? All I know is I was there and I'd do it again," he says.
"I have a daughter. And I said to myself, I'm going to help this person. She could be anybody's daughter."
Written by Mitch Lipka
