A five-year-old boy had quite a nerve-wracking adventure
yesterday, after he slipped away from his mother while she was buying coffee
near a subway station in the Bronx. The mother and son were just underneath an
elevated (as opposed to underground) station, which perhaps accounts for a bit of the boy’s alarming impulsiveness—there’s
nothing romantic about walking down into the city’s steaming bowels, even for a
kid.
As his mother paid for her coffee, the five-year-old
sprinted up the stairs to the platform, slipped under a turnstile, and boarded
a Manhattan-bound train, all before his mother knew where he’d gone. She immediately
alerted authorities, who were unable to locate the boy until he had ridden the
1 train to its final stop in Manhattan—that’s 34 stops.
Little Samuel Sosa was not harmed, thank goodness, but I certainly hope
he has exhausted his interest in running away. Whatever he might have thought
about the train as he saw it wheezing into the station from below, an hourlong
train ride to an unknown destination could not have been all that magical for a
tiny boy.
His mother said she thought that the police response was “good
and fast.” No word on what she thought about the hundreds of New Yorkers who were
completely unfazed by a five-year-old hanging out alone on a subway car.
Photo: community.livejournal.com
