Friday, January 20, 2024
What If a Man Died on a Train...
...and nobody cared?
In Michael Mann's fantastic film, "Collateral," Tom Cruise plays an assassin at work in Los Angeles, a city he doesn't much like. Everyone's too isolated here, he tells Jamie Foxx, the cabdriver he is forcing to do his bidding, and relates the story of a man who died on the LA subway and goes undiscovered for days. The unspoken suggestion: In a city where human life is so little valued, what does it really matter if he kills a few people?
Well, yesterday it happened in New York: A man died on the Q train on his way home from work, and his death went unnoticed for six hours.
Just for the record, let us note that Eugene M. Reilly of Brooklyn was a USPS mail handler and had been for 35 years. He had a wife and three kids, two sons and a daughter. He worked at the Morgan mail processing center, which is on 9th Avenue between 28th and 30th streets, a massive but strangely lonely building; I know it because I sometimes drive by it in taxis late at night, headed back uptown on the West Side Highway. Mr. Reilly was also an Army vet who spent two years in Vietnam as an M.P. According to his neighbor, Yosef Y. Zaklikowsk, "He kept his property very clean." He was overweight and had had heart surgery a decade ago, so foul play is not suspected.
Somewhere within the circle of those few, scant details lies the story of a man, whose death may have gone unnoticed but whose life, I hope, will not go unremembered. ¶ 8:09 AM
In Michael Mann's fantastic film, "Collateral," Tom Cruise plays an assassin at work in Los Angeles, a city he doesn't much like. Everyone's too isolated here, he tells Jamie Foxx, the cabdriver he is forcing to do his bidding, and relates the story of a man who died on the LA subway and goes undiscovered for days. The unspoken suggestion: In a city where human life is so little valued, what does it really matter if he kills a few people?
Well, yesterday it happened in New York: A man died on the Q train on his way home from work, and his death went unnoticed for six hours.
Just for the record, let us note that Eugene M. Reilly of Brooklyn was a USPS mail handler and had been for 35 years. He had a wife and three kids, two sons and a daughter. He worked at the Morgan mail processing center, which is on 9th Avenue between 28th and 30th streets, a massive but strangely lonely building; I know it because I sometimes drive by it in taxis late at night, headed back uptown on the West Side Highway. Mr. Reilly was also an Army vet who spent two years in Vietnam as an M.P. According to his neighbor, Yosef Y. Zaklikowsk, "He kept his property very clean." He was overweight and had had heart surgery a decade ago, so foul play is not suspected.
Somewhere within the circle of those few, scant details lies the story of a man, whose death may have gone unnoticed but whose life, I hope, will not go unremembered. ¶ 8:09 AM
