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Woman shoved in Woman shoved in front of subway tells amazing tale of survival front of subway tells amazing tale of survival
She remembers it like a dream — a 70,000-pound solid steel dream that almost crushed her in the bowels of the city, where subways rumble and train tracks squeal.
But instead of being a big, bloody stain on the tracks at Union Square after a deranged man shoved her in front of an oncoming train Thursday morning, Liliana Sagbaicela is a miracle survivor.
“I feel like the pain is stronger today,” Sagbaicela said Friday as she nursed her wounds in her Brooklyn home, surrounded by her husband and two daughters. “But with everything that happened I feel more at peace because I’m alive. I think the pain will go away. I’m with my family, thank God.”
It is mostly her head that is in pain, she said. Eight stitches stretch like a small train track along her skull. Her shoulder and back are sore — but despite being underneath a subway car carrying dozens of commuters, she did not break any bones.
“My head is spinning around. It hurts,” Sagbaicela said at her Sunset Park home. “I feel like my head is not okay. If there is a slight movement, everything moves.”
Sagbaicela, 40, said she mercifully doesn’t remember much of the incident, graphically captured on horrifying surveillance video.
Video of the attack shows an unhinged Aditya Vemulapati, 24, pacing up and down the platform, sizing up the victim and then violently pushing the woman from behind with both hands in the instant before a northbound No. 5 train arrived.
Sagbaicela goes flying beneath the train, landing in the small space between its rolling wheels, even as an eyewitness covers his eyes and recoils in horror, the video shows.
“I’ll be honest, I still can’t believe it,” Sagbaicela said a day later. “For me everything was so fast, so strong that I lost all senses. So I can’t remember much of what happened.”
She said she only realized what happens at Bellevue Hospital, where she was treated for a head injury.
“In a way it’s better that I can’t remember because I’ll be traumatized,” Sagbaicela said.
“I have a blurry image, but I don’t know if it’s true, that I opened my eyes and I saw that the train was coming. But I don’t know if that happened, if I really could see it.” It happened. And she survived it.
“I never felt the fall or anything,” she said. “I never saw him. He was always behind me.”
Sagbaicela, a Midtown housekeeper, said she actually thought that she had fainted and fallen, even though the man who pushed her had a running start.
“The only thing I remember is when I got to the hospital. They told me what happened.” Sagbaicela recalled. “I said, ‘No, I fell. I fainted.’”
“No, you didn’t faint,” a cop told her, according to Sagbaicela. “We have all the evidence.”
Vemulapati, who is homeless, was charged with attempted murder and reckless endangerment, and was ordered held without bail at his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Friday. His next court date is Dec. 4.
Sagbaicela’s husband, Rene Lleanos, 45, said when he got the call from cops explaining what happened, he suspected the worst.
“I thought about the worst in life, that she was with God,” he said. “My wife was born again. It’s a miracle from God that she is here alive to tell the world that even though sometimes we are negative people, there is someone that helps us. It’s God. Because it was only with a miracle from God that she got out of there alive, walking, talking.”
Sagbaicela estimates she’ll need a couple of weeks to recover. As for getting back to work, she said she’s not sure if she will take the subway back to her job.
“I don’t feel ready to,” she said. “If they gave me the choice, I wouldn’t do it. But I know that’s not an option. I have to do it. It is better for me as a person. In order to lose the fear, I have to face it.”