SC ballet dancer leaps onto NYC subway tracks, saves unconscious man

A 31-year-old man from Greenwood, South Carolina, is being hailed a hero in New York City, after he rescued a homeless man who had been purposely shoved onto subway tracks on the city’s Upper West Side.

It happened about 11:45 p.m. Saturday, when South Carolina native Gray Davis – a dancer with the American Ballet Theatre – was in the Broadway-Seventh Avenue station with his wife, Cassandra Trenary, reported multiple media outlets.

The two watched as a woman shoved a man onto the tracks, where he remained limp and unconscious. However, unlike the others on the platform, Davis jumped onto the tracks to help. His wife and his visiting mother were in disbelief.

“We were all horrified about what was about to happen as the man lay unresponsive on that track,” Davis’ mother, Janie Krabbe B. LeTourneau, wrote in a Facebook post.

“Out of nowhere and just in time, we all watched as a brave young man jumped down, and lifted the man to safety like he was a feather. Shocked, I said, uh, ‘Cassie is THAT Grayson Davis?’ She said ‘Yes it is’.”

People on the platforms “started cheering and yelling ‘you are a hero’,” she recalled on Facebook.

The New York Post called the rescue miraculous, and added that Davis was able to push 58-year-old Stephen Ling onto the platform “in the nick of time before a train pulled into the station.”

Ling was hospitalized with cuts and bruises and a 32-year-old woman was arrested as a suspect in shoving him, The Post reported.

Davis’ bio on the American Ballet Theatre Web site says he was born in Greenwood and graduated in 2004 from the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. He joined the American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company in April 2005, the main Company, as an apprentice, in January 2007 and the corps de ballet in December 2007.

Davis’ was interviewed Sunday by the New York Times about the incident.

“At first, I waited for somebody else to jump down there,” he told the Times. “People were screaming to get help. But nobody jumped down. So I jumped down.”

Davis told the newspaper that he heard a train in the distance, and quickly discovered that it’s tougher to get back on the platform than expected.

“I never realized how high it was,” he told the Times. “Luckily, I’m a ballet dancer, so I swung my leg up.”

This story was originally published June 6, 2017 at 11:02 AM with the headline "SC ballet dancer leaps onto NYC subway tracks, saves unconscious man."