Man hospitalized after being pushed onto Red Line tracks - Chicago News and Weather | FOX 32 News

Man hospitalized after being pushed onto Red Line tracks

A man was hospitalized Wednesday morning after possibly being pushed onto the Red Line tracks at a South Side station, leaving others waiting for their trains "horrified," a witness said.

About 8:10 a.m. at the Red Line station at 79th Street and the Dan Ryan, Linda Logan was waiting for her train downtown when she heard screaming from the southbound platform and saw a man lying on the tracks.

Among the screaming, she heard someone say, "Daddy, daddy!" And "People kept saying, ‘He pushed him, he pushed him,'" Logan said Thursday.

"We were horrified," she said. She said everyone was "standing there in horror" as the man lay on the tracks.

He was "knocked out" and unable to move after falling, she said, and were it not for the actions of some good Samaritans who pulled him up from the track level, she doesn't know what would have happened.

"That man could have been dead," Logan said.

Those who witnessed the incident said a homeless man pushed the other man onto the tracks, she said.

At 8:14 a.m. Wednesday, Chicago Fire Department paramedics took a man from the platform to St. Bernard Hospital, Fire Media Affairs Director Larry Langford said. He was taken via basic life support ambulance, so his injuries were not considered life-threatening.

CTA spokeswoman Catherine Hosinski said a rider fell onto the right-of-way from the southbound platform Wednesday morning. She had no details on how he fell, but noted there was no contact with a train or the third rail.

While police received several calls Wednesday morning that reported a man had either fallen or been pushed onto the tracks, News Affairs had no information as of Thursday afternoon whether a police report was filed. It is possible, police said, that the man who fell did not want to file a report.

Logan recalled the man was on her bus going to the station. He was a "nicely dressed" man with two little girls. "The next time I saw him he was lying on the tracks," she said.

The incident left her shaken, even a day later.

"If you push a man who has two small children with him, you'll do that to anybody," she said. "He had two kids with him. If it happened to him, it can happen to me."