Witness: 'She was yelling . . . the train had 'hit' her baby'
Couple came to worried mom's aid to gather up baby
Rebecca Weinberg and her husband Joel were exiting the Morse L stop Monday night when they noticed a woman hurrying up the stairs carrying a baby in a stroller.
The woman was yelling for someone to hold the train for her.
(Jean Lachat/Sun-Times)
The Weinbergs kept going down the stairs, heading home, when they heard a blood-curdling scream.
"She was yelling either that the train had ‘hit’ her baby or ‘had’ her baby,” said Rebecca Weinberg, 36, of Rogers Park. “It was hard to tell.”
Rebecca Weinberg quickly called 911.
A man, meanwhile, yelled that a child was on the track.
The Weinbergs raced up the stairs and sprinted to the end of the platform, where they saw the baby on the gravel track bed.
“The mother jumped on the track and handed the baby to my husband,” Weinberg said.
She said the 22-month-old girl was handed off to a man who then passed the baby to her.
“My husband helped the woman off the tracks,” she said. “The baby was vomiting.”
Paramedics arrived, and Weinberg gave them the baby, named Rachel.
“The police told me she was given a clean bill of health at the hospital,”
Weinberg said. “That’s the most important thing to me. You can’t sit by when a child and her mother are in anguish.”