Crime & Safety

G Train Horror!

A man struck in the head by the G train on New Year's is fighting to survive.

A man struck in the head on New Year's by a Church Avenue-bound G train is fighting to survive, his family says.

Jonathan Walton, 27, was passed out on the platform of the Classon Avenue stop at around 1:30 a.m. when the train smashed into his head, which was hanging over the edge.

"He had passed out —it was New Year's," said his sister, Harlem Walton. "The train couldn't stop."

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Reports on both Gothamist and The Local depicted a chaotic scene as horrified straphangers came to realize what had just happened.

"I saw the driver of the train calling it in to the MTA; he seemed very shaken up. The man was lying on his back near where the train hit him, motionless but breathing. Emergency vehicles swarmed the scene," read one first-hand account posted on the Local.

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Initially, medics on the scene listed Walton as "likely" — as in, "likely to die" — according to a spokesman for the Fire Department.

But remarkably, Walton is on the mend.

"He won't open his eyes, but he's moving and squeezing everybody's hands," said his sister, who was at Kings County Hospital with him. "They're going to take him off the medication — he's moving and everything."

Still, Walton has a long road to recovery. The extent of the damage to his brain remains unclear.

"They are monitoring him very closely because of the bleeding and swelling of his brain," said Aleesha Morgan, a friend of Jonathan's. "We are all just continuing to pray for him."

Harlem, who drove up from Charlotte, N.C. to be by her brother's side, added that she did not know what neighborhood Walton called home, but that he had been visiting friends who live in the vicinity of Clinton Hill and Fort Greene.

Walton's near-death experience is at least the second violent incident that went down during New Year's celebrations in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. Just before the ball dropped, a man was fatally pushed to the ground in a brawl at the Atlantic Terminal projects.


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