Son mugged, then hit by train, fights for life
JOY WELLS WAS still asleep in her Colorado home when the calls started piling up.
By the time she awoke at 6 a.m., her cell showed 12 missed calls, all from New York.
Her thoughts immediately turned to her 41-year-old son Francis Christie, an artist living in Brooklyn.
But when she dialed the number, the voice on the other end didn’t belong to Christie — it was an NYPD detective.
He delivered news about her son that was difficult to fathom.
Two men had punched him in the face on a Union Square subway platform, knocking him to the ground with his head hanging over the ledge.
Moments later, the detective told her, a southbound Q train screamed into the station, striking Christie’s head and shattering his skull.
“After you answer the phone early in the morning and (someone) tells you this is detective so-and-so and I’m calling about your son, you don’t hear much else after that,” Wells said.
Wells did register one piece of information — her son was somehow still alive.
“I thought, ‘OK, this is a miracle,’ ” recalled Wells, 65. “It’s not his time yet.”
Some two weeks later, Christie’s prognosis remains uncertain. There were small signs of hope — Christie can open his eyes and clench his right hand.
On Tuesday, he sat up in his hospital bed for the first time since the Dec. 16 assault.
But Christie still cannot move the left side of his body and on Wednesday doctors at Bellevue Hospital had to reinsert his breathing tube after he developed MRSA pneumonia.
“We don’t know yet if he’ll be able to talk or walk,” Wells said. “We have no idea yet what the outcome of this will be.”
“I was doing OK until today,” Wells added, her eyes welling with tears. “When I came back to the hospital and they were putting the tube in, I lost it.”
Cops are still searching for the assailants, who were caught on surveillance video inside the subway station following the 3 a.m. attack. “There’s a special place for them,” Wells said.
She last spoke with her son a few days before the attack.
The Flatbush-based Christie was thrilled about an upcoming art show in Greenpoint. He would be displaying several new pieces, some of them created with a new chrome pen.
“He was so excited, he just knew he would sell some good stuff there,” she said.
“I was excited for him. I couldn’t wait till he called me after the show to see how people reacted to his work.”
Wells stayed at her son’s apartment on Tuesday, the first time she slept somewhere other than Bellevue. Among the various art supplies scattered on his desk was the chrome pen.
“It made me happy and sad, being there,” she said. “I don’t know if he’ll ever be able to do his art again.”
Wells was forced to endure a second batch of horrific news this week when she learned her husband, an Army vet suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, had contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized in the intensive care unit.
Wells said she is flying back home Friday morning to check on her husband and tend to the family horse ranch in the small town of La Junta.
She plans to return to New York within a few days. “I have to go, but I don’t want to go,” Wells said. “He’s my only son. He’s the only child I have.” “But who gets hit by a train and lives?” she said. “The story’s not over. Not yet.”