A 4-year-old French tourist yesterday miraculously escaped with only minor injuries after his leg got caught in a subway car door and he was dragged “like a rag doll” 240 feet along the platform.
“If my grandson had died, I would have committed suicide,” the boy’s grandmother, Madeleine Mondjii, said after the ordeal. She was slightly hurt as she ran alongside the train struggling to free the child.
The near-tragedy happened at 5:20 p.m., when the two exited a No. 2 train at the Hoyt Street station in Brooklyn and the door closed on the little boy, Cedric Mondjii, police said.
As the train pulled out, the terrified grandmother tried to keep up with it, frantically battling to pull the child free. But she fell, injuring her knee.
“The train dragged him like a rag doll,” said Funmilayo Chesney, a relative who was standing on the platform. “He was crying as he was being dragged. He was calling for his mother.”
Finally, the conductor and a passenger pulled the emergency cord and the train screeched to a halt with only about 150 feet of platform remaining.
“The conductor of the train was doing as he’s required to do: looking out the window at the platform as he was pulling out of the station,” said Transit Authority spokesman Al O’Leary.
“He spotted the child stuck and immediately pulled the emergency brake.”
The child and his grandmother were taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition.
The boy was treated for abrasions; his grandmother for knee injuries.
City subways have an indication system that keeps operators from moving the train until all of the doors are closed, O’Leary said.
In this case, the train operator had gotten the all-clear to move the train.
“Either the child was extremely small or there could have been a malfunction,” O’Leary said.
The child’s parents are in France and he and his grandmother were visiting relatives in Brooklyn. They had spent the day shopping on 14th Street and had been planning to visit stores on the Fulton Street Mall.