The widow and daughter of the man pushed to his death on the subway tracks are outraged that a photo was taken just before he was hit by a train.
“They are shocked. They are upset by it,” Charen Kim, a lawyer representing victim Ki-Suk Han’s grieving wife, Serim, told the Daily News Tuesday night.
“They can’t believe that their father’s picture is out there, about to get hit by a train,” Kim said. “The widow is very upset.”
Serim Han’s anger over the photo, which was on Tuesday’s New York Post front page, was echoed in the media, as “Today” show co-host Al Roker and CNN’s Anderson Cooper vented over why onlookers, including the Post freelance photographer, apparently didn’t try to save Han.
A police source said Han, 58, was struggling for about 60 seconds to crawl back onto the platform.
“I’m sorry, somebody’s on the tracks, that’s not going to help,” Roker said of the pictures of the ghastly incident.
“Man killed by NY subway as people watched and a photographer took pics. Could/should they have done more?” Cooper tweeted.
His CNN colleague Soledad O’Brien tweeted: “I think it’s terribly disturbing — imagine if that were your father or brother.”
The photographer, Umar Abbasi, told The New York Times he was “being unfairly beaten up in the press.” He said he fired off flashes on his camera 49 times in an effort to warn the motorman.
“The only thing I could think of at the time was to alert the driver with my camera flash,” Abassi said Wednesday during an appearance on the “Today” show.
He insists he wasn’t close enough to pull Han off the tracks, but bystanders who were closer could have helped.
“What really surprises me is the people who were maybe 100 feet from Mr. Han, they didn’t reach out to help him,” Abbasi said. “If I was in a reachable distance, I would have grabbed him and tried to pull him.”
Abassi hopes the photo sparks a debate about how to make train platforms safer.
